


Ways and Means

by mrasaki



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Detectives, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst and Humor, Big Bang Challenge, Detectives, M/M, Police Procedural, UST, abuse of coffee, this is also an ode to the SF Bay Area, won't someone please think of the coffee
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-22
Updated: 2013-05-22
Packaged: 2017-12-12 16:24:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 46,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/813585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mrasaki/pseuds/mrasaki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Unfortunately, this was how most mornings began: McCoy shouted like a fishmonger selling his last vat of tuna, and Sulu spilled coffee on himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> WARNINGS: Graphic descriptions of violence, both in the course of police work and a bit beyond. Some graphic descriptions of bodies, but probably not more than you’d see in _Bones_ or _Law and Order_. (See end notes for detailed warnings that may be spoilery.)
> 
> Author’s Notes: Due to limitations of research and time, and in the interest of story, some liberties may have been taken with the way things really work. I hope you can handwave the little things. :)
> 
> This story was actually written for Star Trek Big Bang 2011, completed in November of that year. Due to many reasons but mostly me being neurotic, I stashed it away and pretended it didn't happen. However, in light of STID and in anticipation of doing another STBB, I rediscovered it and decided it isn’t as terrible as I thought (barring some heavy editing), so heavily edit it I have, and am now finally posting it around.
> 
> My apologies and thanks to my artist, [enkanowen](http://enkanowen.livejournal.com) ([ART HERE](http://enkanowen.livejournal.com/687180.html), and my fanmixer, [earlofcardigans](http://earlofcardigans.livejournal.com) ([MIX HERE](http://earlofcardigans.livejournal.com/519717.html), whose wonderful works did not get the recognition they deserved due to my ~~epic fail~~ actions.
> 
> Additional thanks go to [maypirate](http://maypirate.livejournal.com/) with whom i’ve shared much John Cho glee, and whose Sulu family OCs she generously let me borrow.

When Sulu was seven, he wrote an essay titled, "What I Want to Be When I Grow Up.'

He wanted to be a firefighter, because firefighters got to drive red trucks and wear awesome yellow coats and run around with hoses and heroically rescue cats and babies out of windows, and maybe, little Sulu dreamed, he’d be the first firefighter in _space_.  
  
Some fifteen years later, space didn’t happen. Firefighting neither, for that matter. Being a cop did.  
  
When asked why he became a cop, he made vague jokes about heroic rescues and driving things with sirens, but this just got him weird looks, so he stopped.  
  
ooo

 

"MORNING BRIEFING, DAMMIT!" McCoy bellowed, glaring around the bullpen at the assembled detectives. A baleful eyebrow seemed particularly aimed at Sulu, who flinched guiltily though that was stupid because today he was on _time_ , but McCoy did always make him feel like he’d been caught red-handed stealing out of the collection tray. In his momentary confusion the cup in his hand tilted a fraction too far, sloshing out a searing lap of coffee onto his hand.

Unfortunately, this was how most mornings began: McCoy shouted like a fishmonger selling his last vat of tuna, and Sulu spilled coffee on himself.  
  
"Good morning to you too," Sulu said under his breath to Chekov as he followed the crowd into the room, scrubbing at the stain on his tie. Chekov only nodded as he sat down at McCoy’s table. The seat next to Sulu, who was sitting the next table over, was unoccupied as usual. Maybe it was a kind of hazing, this game of musical chairs where Sulu was always the one left sitting alone, but it was a little too much like the playground in junior high to be anything but depressing. He twirled a pen and tried to look like he didn’t care.

"You’d think we don't do this every morning at eight on the dot, you need me to ring a cow bell or what?”

“Thank you, Len,” Lieutenant Uhura said, thinly. “As always, your…enthusiasm…is appreciated.”  
  
“You’re welcome,” McCoy nodded, giving the room one final scan. “My pleasure, ma’am.” 

A loud clatter came from the back, a screech of tripped-over tables, accompanied by a low “shit.” Detective Kirk was sneaking in the back five minutes late, a black and white rectangular box in one hand, an apologetic smile on his face.  
  
“What is this," McCoy grated, striding forward and snatching the box away from Kirk. He threw it on the table at the front of the room, donuts and powdered sugar spilling everywhere. A collective groan of dismay went around the room. McCoy ignored them all. "Why do you keep doing this to me? Haven’t I said that's bad for you? Next time, bring bagels."  
  
Sulu stared forlornly at a jelly donut that had belly-flopped at his feet, its raspberry innards oozing out onto the linoleum. His stomach growled. 

No, he told himself firmly. The five second rule had no place here. Besides, the floor was filthy _._ One day, he promised himself, he’d wake up early enough for something more than a handful of granola, and until then he wasn’t going to give in to temptation and food poisoning just because he was lazy. 

Behind him, another part of the daily routine: Obviously unperturbed at the disruption of Operation Donut for the seventh time in as many days, Kirk just rolled his eyes at McCoy. McCoy glared back. Kirk said something smart to annoy McCoy. McCoy yelled like a fishmonger again. It was like a sitcom in hell. 

But then a deviation: As if he’d done so every day of his life, Kirk plopped down in the conspicuously vacant seat next to Sulu, and offered him a cheery wave.

Huh. 

There were plenty of empty tables towards the back, so Kirk couldn't possibly have fallen into this particular chair by accident. 

Could he? 

Then, as Uhura read out the minutes and updated them on cases, Kirk kept stealing glances at him and winking whenever Sulu whipped his head around and caught him at it.

Okay.

Sulu would have found this less ominous – or charming, even – except Kirk was an attention whore in love with the sound of his own voice, always was and always would be. Giving attention to those types was like throwing gasoline on a fire, so generally, Sulu tried to ignore him, because if there was any kind of person that really irritated Sulu deep down, Kirk was it. 

Kirk offered him a smile, sly as a kid passing a note in class. Sulu narrowed his eyes at him. 

 _Good morning_ , Kirk mouthed. 

 _Yeah well, you have a big head,_ he thought viciously back at him. Kirk’s smile didn’t falter.  
  
"Sulu!" Uhura snapped, and Sulu jerked back to attention. "You're partnered with Kirk. Congrats."  
  
Then she was moving on to the next point on her agenda except Sulu was still floundering in her wake. "Uh, what?"  
  
She lifted her eyes to his and fixed him with the kind of level stare that promised trouble. "What what, detective?"  
  
Past the thousand questions bottlenecked on the way from his brain to his throat, he managed only a single syllable: "Kirk?" The entire department was staring at him now. A flush burned up his neck, but he croaked out two more: "Really?"  
  
"Yes, really. If you have a problem with that, you can take it up with me in my office." 

Realizing thirty seconds too late that it probably wasn’t politic to sound as if he’d been given a death sentence in front of his new partner and god and everybody, Sulu shut up. The lieutenant stared him down a moment longer as if daring him to say anything else, before returning to her clipboard. 

He kept his head down for the rest of the meeting. Kirk, that smile wiped off his face as totally as if he’d flipped a switch, just stared rigidly ahead.

Uhura cut straight to the chase after Sulu very politely didn’t slam the door to her office. "Get over it. You need a partner, now you have one."  
  
Her matter-of-fact tone irked him. "But Kirk? _Him?_ Really? Do you really see us as partners? He’s – He’s—" 

“Yes?” She folded her hands and looked at him with interest. 

“He’s like Kobe Bryant,” Sulu finished gracelessly. “He doesn’t share the ball.”  
  
She smiled a little at his odd choice of metaphor. "Uh huh. So you want the attention instead.” 

“No, but—“ 

“Do you have a good reason to not partner with him, besides thinking he's an irritating little shit?" The obscenity fell out of her mouth as smooth as butter, hanging in the air of the elegantly neat office.  
  
How could he articulate the tumble of his thoughts? There was just something about Kirk that he didn’t, couldn’t trust. He reminded Sulu too much of all the douche-bag fraternity boys Sulu had ever known. Maybe it was all that effervescent, undiscerning affability towards everybody, which smacked of insincerity.  
  
"Don't misunderstand me, I think he's an irritating little shit too." She fixed him with that predatory eagle stare again. "But you don't need to be buddies to work together, do you? We’re all adults and can work on a professional level, can’t we?"  
  
"I guess so." His gut sank. When she put it like that, his instinctive reaction did seem childish. He did need a partner, had needed one for months, and there wasn’t exactly a whole lot of choice. His previous partner had been forced to retire early under accusations of perjury. Sulu had had nothing to do with it, but the cloud of suspicion had lingered; of the detectives who weren’t stiff and uncomfortable around him – whom he could count on one hand– he would’ve preferred Chekov, who’d been his partner when they’d been on the beat. But Chekov had earned his detective badge before Sulu, and was now partnered with McCoy. 

Sulu should just be grateful to _have_ a partner.  
  
"You two are the only unpaired detectives I have right now. I’d throw around happy, sentimental words like 'teamwork' and 'team effort' like HR wants, but I’ll spare the both of us.”  
  
“So get over it?"  
  
She relaxed into a sour amusement that was probably intended to be placating. Sulu found it vaguely frightening. “Exactly." 

“You couldn’t have asked me first?"  
  
"You would've said no."  
  
"Maybe I wouldn't have." Sulu shot back before he could clap his fat mouth shut.  
  
"Maybe you're just being stubborn because I didn’t ask you pretty please with a cherry on top.” She visibly switched gears then, softening her tone. “Give him a chance, Sulu. You won’t have to teach him anything. In fact, he’ll likely be teaching _you_ a few tricks." That weird smile again, as if she knew something Sulu didn’t. "You might have more in common than you might think. He's just cocky as hell, like certain other people it’s my misfortune to know."  
  
Sulu crossed his arms, starting to grin a little despite himself. He liked Lieutenant Uhura. Talking to her sometimes made you feel like you'd just gone three rounds with a meat grinder, but she gave it to you straight, a quality most people were notably lacking. He didn’t know how she managed to stay afloat in the quagmire of department politics with her distaste for bullshit, but she seemed to do okay despite her blunt words and selectively foul mouth. "Are you saying I'm an 'irritating little shit,' ma'am?" he asked.  
  
She looked as if she wanted to throw a pen at him. "Get out of my office, Hikaru," she said. "And play nice in the sandbox, you hear?” 

As he was closing the door – quietly, this time – she called after him, “And while you're at it, maybe you can teach Kirk something about healthy eating, huh? McCoy’s going to have a coronary one day, and I’ve enough paperwork as it is."

ooo

 

Kirk was waiting for him outside the precinct, squinting against the morning sun in a transparent attempt to read his level of homicidality, which was totally a word. He pushed himself off the wall at Sulu's approach. "Sorry," he said humbly.  
  
This didn’t have the intended effect; it only succeeded in making Sulu feel guilty, which just pissed him off more. But he gritted his teeth and replied, "No, don’t worry about it. It’s not you," because his mom had raised him with manners as ingrained as the part in his hair, and _when someone’s making nice with you, even if he’s a super annoying brat, you do not lock him in the trunk_ had been drilled into him since he was eight. He only wished his older sister had learned the same lesson when she’d exacted her revenge two weeks later (and then again five months later), but then Kirana had been – and still was – better at not getting caught and at lying her head off when he told on her.

He hefted his bag and stalked out into the parking lot towards their assigned car. Kirk trailed behind, saying, "Yeah?" with an instant cheer which made Sulu want to hate him.  
  
"Yeah." Grudgingly.  
  
“I’m James Kirk. Jim.” Sulu looked back. There was that easy, crooked charm again, one hand extended for a shake. “Nice to meet you. Officially.”  
  
Sulu took his hand warily. Kirk’s grip was firm and warm. “Hikaru Sulu. Sorry I didn’t welcome you to SFPD before. I don’t think I joined the division until after you transferred in, and – you know.” He trailed off, offering a weak smile. Kirk wasn’t stupid; Sulu had had plenty of opportunities to acquaint himself with him as just he had the rest of the precinct. He just...hadn’t bothered. 

“Or something,” Kirk finished genially. “Sorry we never got a chance to really talk, huh? Too much stuff to do.” 

That’s because I didn’t want to talk to you, Sulu thought to himself, wondering if Kirk were mocking him – _Jim_ , he corrected in his head. He was going to have to call him Jim, if they were going to be partners.  
  
"Now that we’ve got the introductions over with,” obviously assuming he was in charge, Kirk got the driver's side door of their unmarked sedan open, his ass five seconds from plopping into the seat. “Let’s go."

Sulu slammed to a stop in the middle of the parking lot as if electrified. "Oh, what? Heck no," he said, and swung his shoulder bag, heavy with files and his laptop, full into Kirk’s chest. No, just no. "You’re shotgun," he informed him, and shouldered his way into the driver's side.  
  
There wasn’t even an instant of surprise, only an immediate grunt of, “You should know I have an older brother,” all blue-eyed maniacal glee. Tossing the bag aside, Kirk chest-bumped back, which crammed Sulu up against the frame of the car, and from there it was all elbows and body checks and foot stomping and something just short of and manlier than flailing, until Patrol Officer Gaila catcalled them as she exited the lot. They froze, then separated.  
  
Kirk had obviously enjoyed every twelve-year-old second and was actually laughing, the bastard. "You wanna drive, you just gotta ask, man," he said.  
  
This. _This_ was why he couldn’t stand Kirk. "Lieutenant Uhura said _I’m_ driving!” Uhura had also said to _play nice_ , but to hell with that. “You keep crashing the cars! And you’re crazy! Did I mention crashing cars? I don’t got to ask you for _nothing_."  
  
"Okay, okay," Kirk, on the other side of the car now and evidently alarmed at Sulu’s loss of grammatical form, made soothing, patting motions in his direction. "Chill. You can drive the penis-mobile, detective."  
  
Sulu made an abortive lunge over the roof at him. Kirk jerked back for a moment, caught himself, then laughed as if they were sharing the world’s funniest joke. 

He just—couldn’t. An hour of yoga a day couldn’t deal with this. "Get in the car."    
  
ooo

  
  
Things did get better from there, Sulu was glad to find. Of course, these things were all relative; if starting a partnership with one partner attempting murder by reason of temporary insanity on the other in a parking lot could be considered base zero – or negative numbers, even – then the little blood-pressure-raising aggravations, punctuated with moments of amazement and excitement he could only eloquently express as _yowza_ that Kirk introduced into Sulu’s life on a daily basis, and the surprising bits where he sometimes thought Kirk wasn’t so bad, could only be an ascending ladder. 

With the occasional plateaus. 

And slips.  
  
Their first case together – male, Caucasian, but otherwise unidentified – had been hauled out of the ocean by an enterprising fisherman. 

In this line of work, Vicks was a man’s best friend. Sulu always carried some in his jacket pocket, and at the moment had a generous measure daubed on his upper lip. Thanks to his trusty friend Mr. Vicks, instead of a noseful of eyewatering, putrefying flesh, all he got as he bent over the corpse was eyewatering menthol and a lip that felt like it was on fire. 

The time spent in the ocean water hadn’t been kind to the body. It was barely recognizable as human, all water-logged and discolored fish-nibbled flesh and missing chunks of…everything, and – “Yum,” Kirk observed sagely, snapping on latex gloves with an unnecessary zeal that made Sulu’s back crawl.  
  
“Yes, thank you,” Sulu said instead of throwing him off the pier, and pulled out a pen to prod at an area of what could possibly be the jeans pocket. He instantly regretted opening his mouth to speak because he couldn’t smell the body, but he could _taste_ the smell and – ugh. This wasn’t the worst floater he’d ever seen, but it was certainly the smelliest. It’d been caught above the waterline against the pier by receding tides and had had time to fester during an unseasonably warm March. 

He carefully unearthed a sodden wallet and flipped through it. Bingo.  
  
He held the driver’s license to the light. “Raymond Cahill. Isn’t that the guy who went missing off his yacht a couple months ago?”  
  
“Yeah. Yeah, I think so. But look at that,” Kirk said, pointing at a deep gash in the abdomen. Bloated, water-swollen, it gaped, raw-edged and bloodless. “Well, well, well. Hel- _lo_ , baby. We’re not looking at an accident.”  
  
“Maybe,” said Sulu. “It could’ve been caught on something, post-mortem.”  
  
“Could, but the edges of the wound’s too clean, see?” Kirk leaned in and prodded it with his finger. _Squish_. 

Sulu winced. “Dude _._ ”  
  
“I’m never not going to find it adorable that you say things like ‘dude’ and ‘hella’.”  
  
“I just. Can we focus here? Please? And stop pokingthat.” The noises. The noises were making him ill. And, and – now Kirk was getting into it, flapping the wound open and closed with his fingers. 

“I said stop that,” he snapped. It came out sharp, brittle. Kirk glanced up at him, startled. “You are.” Sulu paused, trying to regain control of his temper, “–mucking up the evidentiary procedure.” 

“Relax. It’s not going to hurt the forensics any. Being in water that long takes care of useful evidence like that, remember?” Kirk winked at him and prodded the wound experimentally one more time. Sulu was sure it was purely to goad him, and the most annoying thing was, _it was working_. Count to ten, he told himself, breathed deeply, and regretted it instantly. 

“Stickler for the rules, huh?” Kirk asked casually as Sulu coughed and gagged, but he watched Sulu with something that could have been disappointment, or no small measure of disapproval. 

“Getting chewed out by the DA for losing her a case just once is more than enough for me, all right? I don’t know about you, but I don’t enjoy getting in trouble. I _especially_ don’t enjoy suspensions. Haven’t you been reamed out by the lieutenant enough? You like it so much, you keep going back for more?” 

“Sometimes,” Kirk said, “You need to color outside the lines to get the job done properly.”    

“But screwing around with the body so you can have a laugh? Do that on your own time. This used to be a person, all right? He had family, friends. People who will miss him. So be respectful, okay?” Disrespectful, that’s what it was. Cops – and other first-responders like paramedics, ER staff, and firefighters – generally had their own species of gallows humor, but that was one lesson Sulu had never managed to learn. And this ‘coloring outside the lines’ thing did not bode well; detectives with unorthodox methods and not much respect for evidentiary procedure were great for the tv shows and movies, but not real life. His previous partner had been the same way. 

Kirk was looking at him. All Sulu’s previous dislike for him rose up in his throat like gorge, because that look, that smug arrogance like he knew something about Sulu that people were just too polite to mention. Sulu wanted to punch it off his face. 

Uhura would probably have something to say about punching his partner of a week. 

“Look,” he finally said. “I’m sure you’ve heard of my last partner. Yeah, don’t pretend that you haven’t. He was a lot like you. Not that you’d lie on the stand to put someone in jail–” his lips curled at Kirk’s indignant expression. “But he was not too careful about all that evidentiary procedure just like you, okay? And that attitude is what sucked me in his wake and nearly got me fired. I like my job, and I don’t like people thinking I’m a dirty cop. So don’t. Don’t do that.” 

The forensics photographer who was crouched at the body’s feet lowered her camera and gave them a curious look. 

“Look, I’m sorry,” said Kirk after a pause, obviously taken aback. “I shouldn’t have done that, okay? I wouldn’t have either, except seriously, there’s not going to be anything we can get off the body at this point that a little handling will hurt.” He looked so abashed that Sulu relented, just a little. 

“Okay, okay, apology accepted,” Sulu muttered, kicking at a spur on the piling. What was it about Kirk’s stricken face that made him feel as if he'd kicked a puppy? “Just don’t – just show some respect, okay?” The contrition on Kirk’s face deepened, and Sulu groaned inwardly. “Never—never mind. So,” he asked in a ghastly attempt to cover the awkward silence, “How do you know it’s a deliberate wound?”

Kirk grinned instantly. “Because I’m awesome.” 

At his expression, Kirk faltered, then continued, “Also, this.” He shuffled around the body to the other side, and tilted the head a little. “Look,” he said, pointing at a large dent in the skull, warming to his subject. “ _That’s_ accidental. When a person drowns, they float face down, the blood goes to the head, but there’s no evidence of that kind of discoloration here, or anywhere. No blood in the body. Ergo, Mr. Cahill here got stabbed and bled out, not drowned.”  
  
Sulu stared at the body for a long time. “You’re bs-ing me.”  
  
“You don’t believe me?” An offended edge, masquerading as humor, underlined Kirk’s tone.  
  
“How the heck can you tell? You’re not a forensic pathologist! I—“ He gestured at Kirk to shut up. “Don’t. I know what you’re going to say.”  
  
Kirk laughed. “I’m awesome, yes, you can say it.”  
  
Sulu hung his head. “Coffee. I need coffee. Starbucks. I—“ he gestured weakly at the end of the other pier. “I’ll be right back. You seem to have everything figured out, so you finish up here, Sherlock.”  
  
“Venti Strawberries n Crème frapp, extra whip with chocolate drizzle. Okay?”  
  
Sulu gave him the finger.  
  
ooo

  
  
Well, he still got it for him, anyway. Jerk.  


ooo

 

  
The core of his dislike, Sulu thought to himself later that afternoon as he hung grimly onto his coffee with one hand, tilting it from side to side in a futile attempt to compensate for Kirk’s driving (which was hardly worthy of the word, as that implied _control_ ), and the jesus bar with the other, was that Kirk was so damn good at what he did. That in of itself wasn’t a negative, but Kirk was just so…so – to borrow Uhura’s word – _cocky_. He was a curious pastiche of _charming_ and _smart_ and also _irritating_ because of the first two, and what fascinated Sulu – because _fascinating_ was Kirk summed up in one word –was that he’d become convinced that Kirk was some sort of deductive genius, and effortlessly so. It rankled deep in Sulu’s soul that Uhura was right; he was being taught a thing or three by a guy not much older than he was. And was not at all humble about it. 

Which was annoying. 

Sulu hadn’t decided yet which part was more so. 

The medical examiner had come along, studied the corpse with a jaundiced eye as if there was nothing new on the face of the earth and this water-bloated body was just another in a long line of the same-olds, which it probably was, and had drawled, “Gut-stabbed, looks like. I’d haveta open ‘im up to be sure, but I’d say you boys have a homicide on your hands. Guess someone helped ‘im offa that boat, huh?” 

Whatever Kirk was doing in a municipal police force instead of like, the FBI, Sulu didn’t even know, but Kirk had been – and still was – insufferably pleased with himself. 

A call came over the radio. Kirk flipped the siren on. Sulu closed his eyes as Kirk slipped the car into the right lane between a semi and a pickup, with barely a prayer between bumpers, steering with one hand and talking into the mike in the other and looking everywhere but at the road. Sulu hadn’t been to church since he was old enough to stand up for his right to sleep in on Sunday mornings, but he was sure going to get right with God and the Virgin Mary if he lived. 

He promised. 

Even if it was rather hard to remember the Hail Mary when you were fifteen years out of practice and were going at roughly the speed of light.  
  
Kirk took a hard right off the exit on what felt like two wheels. The screeching of brakes and a cacophony of horns arose behind them, then he wrenched at the steering wheel again and slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting a guard rail. Sulu’s seatbelt clotheslined him like a wrecking ball into his chest. His coffee wound up all over his lap.  
  
That was another thing he’d learned from Kirk: iced drinks only.

ooo 

 

Occupied with the daily grind of paperwork and investigations, punctuated with near crashes and near-constant moments of irritation, it seemed only an eyeblink before Sulu had a moment’s peace to look around and realize that two months had passed. 

Kirk was still alive. Sulu’s blood pressure seemed to be holding steady, depending on the day and whether they were in the car. All in all, though he still hadn’t quite decided if Kirk was going to work out, the trial period was going better than he’d expected. 

Well. If a dented squad car – courtesy of Kirk, of course – with a resultant meeting with Uhura, in which she had glared at them for fifteen minutes in icy silence as they squirmed, and losing more tussles for the driver’s seat than he won, counted as ‘going better than expected.’ 

They finally got ahold of Raymond Cahill’s wife, an icy blonde and CFO at one of the major banks in the city. She hadn’t seemed to care overly much that her equally rich philanthropist husband had gone missing then turned up looking like something from the back of Sulu’s fridge, nor that she’d been so difficult to pin down that the police hadn’t spoken to her about the case until nearly seven weeks after her husband had been found. But eliminating her as a suspect was easy enough; she’d been in Bangkok on business. A pre-nup had been in place, and at any rate she had more money than he did. There was no motive to pin her down with. 

Weird, because she’d freely told them of her husband’s twenty-year-old mistress, and had been as cool speaking about it as if she’d been discussing the stock market. She’d even had the girl’s name and phone number in her digital rolodex. 

 “Gee, I wonder if this is a set-up,” Kirk said to him side-mouth. Sulu couldn’t help himself – he snorted laughter. 

“So you do have different expressions,” said Kirk, smiling faintly. “Besides ‘annoyed’ and ‘bored.’” 

This killed the laughter instantly. If there was one thing that Sulu hated with a passion, it was being told to _smile more_. “It happens.” 

“You should laugh more often,” Kirk said mildly. “It looks good on you. Len’s better at the scary faces.” 

This stung, for some stupid, inexplicable reason. “Ha. Can we go?” 

“I’m driving.” 

“No.” 

“For the record, I was joking.” 

“And, I wasn’t.” 

It _was_ stupid and guaranteed to be a frame-job of the most sordid kind, so they waited for it to come back full circle in a fugue of impatience so they could arrest the wife. Likely she’d just wanted to be rid of the man without any legal fuss. Perhaps she’d gotten tired of his philandering. 

It was the same story, every time; they just needed the hard evidence to do anything about it. Then a cross-check of the yacht’s crew with the suspect’s known acquaintances turned up something interesting: the mistress' boyfriend had been a cook on Raymond Cahill’s yacht. The subsequent search warrant of the boyfriend’s apartment turned up the murder weapon. 

It was so easy, it was ridiculous. 

Except, this was his and Kirk’s case. That guaranteed that there would be no such thing as easy. Or that an arrest could happen without being as embarrassing as possible. 

The arrest turned into an indecent as they pulled up to the curb. The boyfriend, who’d knifed his girlfriend’s sugar-daddy – aka Raymond Cahill – and chucked him overboard, was rolling around on the front lawn with the girlfriend in question, clothes strewn hell-to-breakfast. They were punching each other as they rutted like – like –  
  
"Baboons," Kirk supplied, as they finally pulled away. He sounded exhausted. Sulu gave him a sympathetic look. Kirk had gained some esteem in his eyes over the past months but was still nowhere near out of the red. But in his view, any person who had just spent that much time with naked wanger nearly slapping him in the face as its owner screamed about his civil rights and struggled in the world’s grossest wrestling match, deserved _some_ respect in his book.  
  
"Fuck you!" the boyfriend screeched from the back, and gave the barrier a couple of kicks with his bare feet. They hadn’t been able to persuade the guy to put his clothes back on, and judging from the way his pupils were blown like uneven ink blots, it was a miracle they’d even got him in the car without losing fingers.  
  
"You get any blood on my car, and I’m coming back there," Sulu warned, glaring at him in the rear-view. PCP, or crack. He hated both, because not only did it ruin lives, it made people _crazy_.  
  
"Yeah," Kirk added helpfully, "they don’t call him ‘Stinkface Sulu’ for nothing."  
  
Sulu closed his eyes. What did that even mean? Why. Whywhywhy. Why did Kirk have to be so... _weird_?  
  
“I love you, baby!” the guy yelled out the window at his girlfriend, who was being loaded into a  patrol car. He smooshed his face and tongue up against the glass, which hadn’t been cleaned in like, _ever_ , and rubbed himself along it, leaving greasy smears. And from the sudden acrid smell filling the car, he’d just pissed himself. Which they would have to clean themselves.  
  
Sulu rolled down his window. “In another universe, I’m a firefighter. In space,” he told Kirk.  
  
“I’m a dinosaur,” Kirk grinned.  
  
“Shut up.”

ooo

 

They had the weekend off, which gave Sulu the chance to clean his suits, pants, ties, and shirts, all of which had suffered horrendously with the convergence of coffee with Kirk into Sulu’s life. What clothing that hadn’t been ruined with hot drinks had been liberally shed on by his cat Spock, who seemed concerned that his owner might die of hypothermia if he did not conscientiously donate a layer of fur onto all of Sulu’s clothes and bath towels. 

So Saturday was laundry day. 

Sunday was dinner with his parents. Chekov squinted at him from across the dinner table. Sulu resolutely dumped rice onto his plate from the takeout box and ignored the evil little twinkle in Chekov’s eyes. Sulu family dinners were a tradition, but his mom hated cooking, Sulu and his dad sucked at it, Kirana was too busy and didn’t even manage to come home most of the time, Akiko only knew how to bake, and Chekov was a mooch, so take-out it was. Today was Indian. 

“So, how is Jim?” Chekov asked. His grin turned an innocent query into a question loaded with depths of lecherous meaning. 

“What. What do you mean?” Sulu replied, trying valiantly to ignore the way his ears had flamed red for no explicable reason at all. “He’s fine.” 

“Have you invited him over for family dinner yet?” 

“Why would I?” 

“You invited _me_.” 

“Yeah, because you’ve been coming here since high school. I can’t get rid of you.” 

“Rude,” Akiko said cheerfully, and snapped her fingers impatiently at the box of bhindi masala for Sulu to hurry up. 

“Your parents love me, I’m like a second son,” Chekov replied smugly. “The _better_ son.” 

“No gratitude, man.” Sulu pretended irritation, but he was smiling. “I have to take this from a geeky little sophomore transfer from Russia? I practically _rescued_ you. Which, by the way, you’ve never thanked me for.” 

“I didn’t need your help.” 

“Right, because the bullies loved scrawny mathletes in bow ties and ugly Soviet bloc cordoroys.” 

“I took them on very well,” Chekov snorted contemptuously. “They didn’t scare me. And I don’t think they liked skinny Asian juniors with big mouths, either.” 

Sulu had to grin at the memory. There’d been some epic knock-down, drag-out fights in the parking lot, locker rooms, gym, classrooms. He and Chekov had bonded in those dusty, interminable stretches of time outside the principal’s office as they waited for their parents to come, and in the ticking boredom of almost constant detention. Sulu’s parents had thought very little of their crazed friendship; all the way through college, they’d considered Chekov a rather dubious character until they’d simply got used to his continual presence in the Sulu household. 

Chekov carefully spooned chicken korma onto his plate in a mound so it wouldn’t touch anything else on his plate. “So, like us, you’re friends, yes? You like him, yes? So why wouldn’t you?” 

“Yeah, why don’t you?” Akiko elbowed him. “You never shut up about him.” 

“I do not,” Sulu protested. “I mean, I don’t like him. And I do shut up – I mean, I don’t talk about him all the time. Wait.” 

“You’re talking about him right now, big bro,” Akiko grinned, and Chekov chortled and gave her a high-five across the table. 

“God. Why do you have to be so annoying?” He would’ve added, _more annoying than Kirk_ , except that would’ve been talking about Kirk again, and Akiko would get even more annoying. 

“ _Mom_ ,” Akiko complained loudly. “Roo’s being mean to me again.” 

“Hikaru,” their mom said from the kitchen, but absently. She obviously hadn’t been listening. 

“Aren’t you a little too old to be tattle-taling?” Sulu hissed at her. 

She grinned back and kicked him under the table. “Why don’t you invite him? Pavel says he’s cute.” 

“This is why I don’t invite him over, you two would get along way too well.” 

“Maybe you should set him up with Kirana. Mom thinks she’s getting too old to be unmarried.” 

“ _No._ ” 

She kicked him again. “Do it.” 

“Shut up!” 

“ _Mom!”_  

ooo 

 

The following Monday was quiet. Sulu, never a morning person even on his best day, much less Monday, was grateful. While Kirk took statements at a mugging-turned-homicide in which the fifteen witnesses who had been within fifty yards of the incident were all claiming to have not seen a single thing, he sat in the car, listening to Armin on his iPod with one ear while keeping the other on the radio and trying to feel less like he’d been run over by a gravel truck. 

He could help. He should help. 

It wasn’t as if he were being petty. Sherlock had it covered. 

Okay, maybe he was being childish. Just a teensy bit. There was just something to Kirk, a latent talent that seemed to bring out Sulu’s inner twelve-year-old. And after Akiko’s comment, and Pavel’s innocent question so loaded with filthy innuendo, he felt a strange reluctance now to be too close to Kirk. It was stupid. He was stupid. _They_ were stupid. 

He would do it. He would invite Kirk over to Sunday dinner. Was it too soon? They’d only been partners a little over two months. They still were getting used to each other, Kirk learning to be mindful of Sulu's little triggers, Sulu trying to have less of a knee-jerk reaction to everything Kirk said or did, but they weren’t friends. Heck, he was torn even using the word _associate_. 

Colleague. That was it. 

He was overthinking things again…and now he’d worked himself into a froth of guilt and confusion. Fantastic, he sighed to himself, and got out of the car to help.

His quiet morning came abruptly to an end with squealing brakes and a dull crunch, then the musical tinkle of glass.  
  
He looked around just in time to see the driver of the silver Camry in front – a tall-ish guy in jeans and a black and white jacket, but who was too far away to see identifying details – slam open his door and take to his heels, knocking over several pedestrians as he went. Kirk yelled something Sulu couldn’t understand but was surely very heroic, and took off after him like a sprinter going for Olympic gold. Gone, before Sulu could even think the words _back-up_ , or even _wait_. 

Damn, he could run, Sulu thought numbly, staring after them _._ Like a gazelle and with as little reason, considering the car wasn’t going anywhere, the accident wasn’t even the runner's fault, and the cause of the 100 meter dash was probably as minor as lapsed insurance. Kirk had obviously not gotten the memo that he wasn’t on patrol anymore and in theory above footchases after petty offenders.  
  
He shook his head and paused long enough to call it in before he went to inspect the accident. _Dispatch, Kirk’s gone rogue. 10-4. Send someone in the general direction of_ _long gone_ _, and_ _not here_ _._  
  
He’d been studying the damage to the bumper for several moments before his brain caught up to what he was seeing. The trunk had popped open in the impact. Inside the trunk was something that didn’t belong: a long, lumpy package wrapped in black garbage bags, crisscrossed with duct-tape. A package shaped suspiciously like a body.  
  
"What's that, man?" someone called from the sidewalk, and Sulu came back to himself from that first instant of shock, back to the middle of Third and Mission with a growing crowd of tourists goggling at him and snapping photos, having got considerably more excitement out of their San Francisco trip than the usual shots of the Golden Gate Bridge and cable cars.The other driver was out of his car by now, gabbling on the phone to his insurance agent, and hadn’t even noticed anything amiss.  
  
It was easy to retreat to the hard-won, professional part of himself and follow procedure. Looked to see if the body really was DOA, moving the tarp just enough to check vitals, but not enough to get forensics breathing down his neck. Called it in to dispatch, pushed back the crowds, preserved the crime scene, and he was totally gravy, just doing his job, until the medical examiner pushed back the plastic tarp covering the body and he saw one filmed over eye, the curl of dark hair, blood dried across a ruined cheek in a maroon spiderweb smear, and that carefully cultivated detachment was snatched away like a curtain.  
  
One year on the force as a detective and five on patrol, and having seen plenty of dead bodies helped keep his good friend breakfast from making an encore onto his shoes, but it was a close thing. She looked like Akiko just enough that he had to look again for his sanity’s sake. It wasn’t his little sister, thank god, and relief – and guilt for the relief – washed over him in equal measure.  
  
Everything was pretty much under control before Kirk got back, sweaty, panting, empty-handed. Other cops and detectives had arrived and were milling around importantly, ambulance and CSI had shown up, the tow trucks were jockeying for position, and everything imaginable was in clearly labeled baggies. 

Sulu gave him an once-over. His shirt was torn. There was a scrape along one cheekbone, and he smelled vaguely like a dumpster. "You okay?" asked Sulu.  
  
"Lost him over a fence." At least Kirk had the good sense to look abashed. "What's going on?"  
  
"Our hit-and-run's got a dead body in the trunk."  
  
Kirk peered past Sulu's shoulder. "Oh."  
  
"Yeah." There wasn’t much else to be said. Casual conversation at crime scenes had always been vaguely weird to Sulu, so he avoided it, scribbling notes to himself in his notepad for the detectives next on the rotation to take the case, and didn’t notice Kirk was gone until he heard running feet and then faint yarking noises from a nearby alleyway.  
  
Kirk was doubled over, one hand supporting himself against the grimy brick wall, puking up what looked to be a week's worth of lunches. Sulu's own stomach did a sympathetic double-flip, well helped along by the acrid smell of stale urine and now vomit in the close space. He went to pat him on the back, then thought better of getting too close when some barely missed his toes. "You alright?"  
  
Kirk shook his head, eyes squeezed shut, veins popping, the very illustration of _Of course I'm not okay, asshole._ He retched a couple times more, spat, then stood, looking very embarrassed. Cops, especially seasoned homicide detectives, weren’t supposed to puke. It was practically writ.

In some weird way, Sulu found this small shred of humanity both disconcerting and yet, comforting.  
  
He offered him the only thing he could: privacy. He backed out of the alleyway and kept a sharp eye out for looky-loos and other cops who would totally mock him.  
  
When Kirk finally came out, wiping his mouth, Sulu said, “There’s mouthwash in the car.”  
  
Kirk’s mortification deepened with every word. Sulu clamped his idiot mouth shut as they headed back across the street to the car.  
  
“Her name’s Tamura Lee,” Kirk said finally. Sulu, who’d been watching the MEs work, startled. “You know her?”  
  
“Yeah. Sort of.”

“Okay. How?”  
  
Kirk shook his head and set his lips in a taut white line. Sulu knew him well enough by then to know nothing else was forthcoming. He’d gone off somewhere into the recesses of his brain, his eyes far and unseeing, as if he’d built a wall over which no one could reach. Silent and Kirk were two things that did not get along, like pickles and gravy, and it was unnerving when the two coincided.  
  
In the end, Sulu had to dig the small bottle of Scope out from beneath the piles of paper and napkins in the glove compartment, pressing it into Kirk’s hand, and Kirk didn’t even say thank you.  
  
ooo

  
  
He was off-shift, technically. Unpaid overtime was a fact of policework; with the budget slashed by a desperate city hall and with no help in sight from state or federal funding, there simply weren’t enough detectives to cover the workload, which now included today’s homicide-in-trunk. 

The single advantage of having nearly half the police force laid off, at least, was that there were less around who were actively hostile to Sulu. Things had been practically normal, lately. Maybe it had a lot to do with Kirk, who was popular in the force, and whose continued partnership with Sulu demonstrated that Sulu wasn’t some kind of cursed albatross, or something. 

He was sitting at his desk, trying to at least finish his initial report by seven so he could go home and feed his cat, when McCoy walked by and cleared his throat to get Sulu’s attention.  
  
The older detective dropped a thin manila folder on the desk. He asked, “Is Kirk okay?” His face twitched, as if asking the question hurt him deep inside.  
  
Sulu blinked. “As far as I know. Why do you ask?”  
  
This got him a look. “He’s moping around on the steps outside. Wasn’t he off an hour ago?”  
  
“I—yeah, I think so.” Technically Sulu had been too, but Kirk was a faster typist than Sulu, who’d never quite graduated from the two-finger method. Kirk had dumped his paperwork into the right boxes, emailed everything to the right people, and had been out the door without a look or word to anyone. “Why’s he still here?”  
  
McCoy rolled his eyes. “Because, you know, I only mention this to you as a topic of polite conversation. Why don’t you go ask him.”  
  
“Why don’t _you_ ask him?”  
  
McCoy’s face twitched again. “I have to wash my hair.”  
  
“Why, detective,” Sulu leaned back in his chair, smirking. “Does this mean you care? Kirk’s master plan is working?” The roller chair nearly slid out from underneath him, ruining the effect.  
  
McCoy laughed outright. It made him look surprisingly younger, less careworn, less cynical. “You’ve got to be joking.”  
  
“I’ve seen him in action. It works on a surprising number of people.” Which defied the known laws of the universe, in Sulu’s opinion. 

McCoy studied him for a long time, eyebrow hiked as far up as it would go. “Don’t like him much, do you?” 

Sulu shifted, feeling uncomfortably like McCoy was x-raying his very soul with that over-expressive caterpillar eyebrow, and finding him wanting. “I wouldn’t go that far. We do okay.” 

McCoy shrugged and indicated the folder. “Here. Secondary ID’s back on your vic in the trunk. She’s confirmed as Tamura Lee from Los Angeles, born 1977. Reported missing two days ago as a missing persons rather than kidnapping. No record, but her prints are in the database, probably because of that child fingerprinting drive in the 80’s. The car, registered to a Katherine Morales-Hammell, pinged back stolen, so not much hope there. Still waiting on the forensics.”  
  
“Wow. Thanks, Len. Seriously, you’re awesome.” Sulu flipped through the folder, feeling McCoy’s eyes on him, suspecting the older detective had hand-delivered it to him not out of the goodness of his heart, but out of pure curiosity.  
  
“So how did he know her?” McCoy asked impatiently at last, when Sulu didn’t volunteer anything else. Some of this information was new; others he’d added to the file himself. Tamura had been pretty, fine boned and small. Probably Korean, maybe half. No medical examiner’s report, not yet; that’d take at least a week. No immediate results on fibers, hairs, or fingernail scrapings on the body. Preliminary cause of death – strangulation, with obvious ligature and finger marks around the throat, along with several stab wounds to the torso. There were photos of the crime scene he didn’t examine too closely.  
  
“He didn’t say.”  
  
“He was LAPD before coming here.” It wasn’t a question.  
  
“I didn’t really ask.”  
  
“Sulu, dammit.”  
  
Sulu looked up and shrugged, nonplussed. He’d never pegged McCoy as a gossip hound. “Seriously, I don’t ask.” He wasn’t lying; all he knew for sure about Kirk, besides his deplorable taste in coffee and all things donut, and how he snorted when he found something especially hilarious, was the same thing everybody else knew. Which was next to nothing.  
  
“What do you two talk about all fucking day?”  
  
He replied absently as he returned to flipping through the papers, pausing on Kirk’s report that was two densely typed pages consisting of the longest description of ‘and I lost him over a fence’ he’d ever read, “Football. Cars. American Idol. Beer. Whose dick is  bigger, I don’t know.” He yelped as McCoy slapped him upside the head.  
  
“Asshole,” McCoy said as Sulu scowled up at him, rubbing his skull. “I know plenty of compromising facts about _you_. Including penis size.”  
  
Sulu gaped at him. “First of all, ew. And second, Pavel wouldn’t know – “  
  
“Try me,” McCoy said, and the way he said it would have been more than a little frightening if the corner of his mouth hadn’t also been curved ever so slightly up. Then, more gently, “He’s not a bad kid, you should know. Sure, he acts like king rooster of the shit barnyard most times, but partners gotta have each others’ backs. Even if you can’t decide if you even like him from day to day.” 

The silence stretched out between them. McCoy’s eyes were, as always, weary and cynical, Sulu realized, but also held real concern – for Kirk? He hadn’t known the man even liked him. 

He broke the connection first, turning away to clear off his desk. “Man, why are you telling me this? I gotta say, this new, softer side of you is freaking me out.” 

“Christ. I’m _saying_ , go check on him. See if he’s okay.”  
  
Sulu peered at him, suddenly certain McCoy knew of Kirk’s stint in the alleyway. If Sulu ever found the bastard who’d snitched –  
  
“You won’t find out,” McCoy said as if he’d read his mind, and smiled that slow smile again. “And don’t you dare tell the kid we had this conversation.”  
  
“Don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me,” Sulu called after him and laughed as McCoy lifted his hand, not looking back, and delineated two inches between thumb and forefinger.  
  
Sulu found Kirk, true to report, crouched on the stoop. Shoulders hunched against the cold coming in from the ocean, he was staring across the street at the dispirited square buildings that seemed to occupy every block on this side of the city.  
  
He had a cigarette in his hand, and this more than anything told Sulu that something was not right in the Land of Kirk. Kirk was a social or stress smoker, not a habitual one. And there he was, backlit by the street lamp like a bad noir film, his own island of isolation overshadowed by the bleak drone of the cars passing by on the 80 to the Bay Bridge.  
  
Sulu had a pretty good inkling of what was stuck in Kirk’s craw, but the feeling that he’d almost rather get his hand caught in a bear trap before starting the ‘hey, lets’s talk about our feelings’ conversation faded at the look in Kirk’s eyes as if he were studying something unpleasant and very far away.

“It’s my fault.” It came out tired, remote. “Jesus, what a clusterfuck this is.”  
  
Sulu tried to say something not along the lines of _W_ _hat do you mean_ but the “Who?” came out shrill and too loud and stupid anyhow. 

Kirk didn’t seem to notice. “I notified the next of kin thirty minutes ago. They didn’t take it so well.” He raised the cigarette to his lips again, the glowing point of it trembling.  
  
Oh. The girl. It’d been a quiet couple of weeks for homicide – first the floater, then Tamura. Kirk had been a bit…off since they’d discovered the body. They’d done the usual – at-scene witnesses, subpeonaed the traffic cams at the intersection, ran the license plates, towed the car back to the impound lot so the forensics team could go over it with meticulous care. Whoever it was had been ridiculously lucky; the day’s labors had only yielded a general description – male, possibly Caucasian, brownish or dark blonde hair. The traffic camera hadn’t captured anything except the back of his head. 

The day had been, to put it lightly, frustrating, but not more so than the average murder. 

Strange. 

Sulu didn’t slap the cig out of Kirk’s hand or lecture him about how the stuff would kill him like McCoy would’ve done, but –slowly – plucked it out of his fingers and took a drag. The butt was wet with Kirk’s saliva and the smoke burned deep in his lungs, but the look of surprise on Kirk’s face was worth it.  
  
“Let’s get some Korean,” he suggested, after blowing it back out into the chill wind.  
  
ooo

  
  
There were very few problems that couldn’t be cowed by the judicious application of marinated meat and copious amounts of cheap beer, at least in Sulu’s humble opinion, so he sipped his Hite and slapped more meat on the grill as the evening wore on, watching Kirk stuff his face as if a famine were impending.  
  
After the first hour, it became very evident there was no way Sulu was going to get home in time to feed Spock, so he texted his sister under the table. 

The reply came almost instantly: _I will name him Squishy and he_ _shall_ _be mine_. 

God, his sisters were so weird _._ Why couldn’t he be related to non-weirdos who could just give a yes or no answer like normal people? But Akiko could be trusted to keep her word, so there was a chance the cussed cat wouldn’t piss in his shoes in revenge. All he had to do was put up with some sass from his little sister. 

Sometimes he wondered if cat pee wouldn’t be better.  
  
As the booze and food did their work, the tense lines of Kirk's body began to melt and that unnatural silence to thaw. His partner was a social creature, Sulu had always known, but until today he hadn’t realized how little of himself Kirk actually divulged in the screen of constant chatter that interacting with him entailed. Listening in silence, he picked at the _banchan_ side dishes that were wedged in between platters of marinated ribs and lettuce. Watching the way Kirk’s eyelashes ticked against his cheekbones, the way his blue eyes darkened as he paused and thought on how to make the words come without slicing on the way out, as Kirk told him about Tamura. Short sentences, not much to tell: Tamura, the stubborn and wildly intelligent nineteen year old little sister of the former friend. Who had gotten in trouble for so many reasons from pretty much the moment she was old enough to realize no one could make her do anything, whom he’d spent his LAPD years chasing down and worrying about and eventually burning out over. 

“Maybe I was a little in love with her,” Kirk admitted, as if he were confessing a murder. He was smoking again.  
  
They’d relocated to a _norebang_ after the restaurant. The seedy karaoke bar was one of the few places besides clubs in NorCal that was open past one, unlike the 24 hour eateries of  LA, as Kirk complained for the umpteenth time in two hours.  
  
“You grew up in the land of cows, what do you know?” Sulu mumbled into the vinyl-covered song book, trying to find any song in English that he knew.  
  
Kirk offered him a quick grin and stubbed out his cigarette. “I lived in LA for ten years, for college then police academy, then the force. That long enough to qualify, asshole?”  
  
Sulu had no answer to that. Born and raised in the Bay Area, he could count the times he’d been out of the state on one hand.  A family trip to Japan when he was five for the funeral of a grandmother he had never met, occasional alcohol-sodden trips with college buddies to Tijuana during college, and one disastrous trip to Vegas with his then-girlfriend two years ago. Hardly a globe-trotter, he was. So he let Kirk’s comment slide and put more beer in his face in the meantime.

Soju and beer on the table; Sulu was damn sure the place didn’t have a liquor license of any kind and last he’d checked, smoking inside was illegal.  Luckily he didn’t want their impromptu night out to come to a screeching halt, so he couldn’t be bothered to cite them – at least, not yet. 

Kirk could be surprisingly good company, he’d found. He could tell stories with a skill that made Sulu nearly inhale his beer several times. He could even _sing_ , performing a passable rendition of Unchained Melody with a falsetto that could shatter glass. He also wasn’t stupid – Sulu was chagrined at his own surprise at that – and could speak of politics and current events with ease. He’d even been an English major in college. 

That was hot. Sulu stared at him, imagining him studying in a library, maybe ridiculous little reading glasses perched on his nose…and…and oh god. He buried himself into his beer in an attempt to drown the image seared into his brain. 

It was the beer. Maybe it was affecting him more than he’d thought. 

 “So how’d she wind up here?” he asked after judging the interval long enough. The awkward question didn’t fit quite as smoothly into the conversation as Sulu had rehearsed in his head.  
  
Kirk shrugged. “I can’t say. By the time I was done with LAPD, I’d stopped talking to her. Couldn't do it anymore. Couldn't do LA anymore. So I transferred here.”  
  
Man, there were a wealth of things left unsaid in that simple sentence. Cops didn’t just up and transfer to another city; they were accepted into a police academy, were groomed and trained to join that city’s police force. Usually for life. 

That’s how _you_ wound up here,Sulu wanted to say, but he bit down so hard on his tongue he almost tasted blood. Sarcasm wasn’t going to be helpful, and if he couldn’t think of anything nice to say he shouldn't say anything at all, as his mother always reminded him. His mother was full of such useful adages. They were generally said to him in relation to one of his sisters.  
  
Sulu fiddled with his beer bottle. “Jim.”  
  
“God, why’re you calling me that? Are you feeling okay? Am I in trouble?” That sharp cynical grin, so uncharacteristic of Kirk, reappeared. Sulu frowned at it.  
  
“Fine. _Kirk_.”  
  
“Are you going to say something stupid like how this wasn’t my fault?”  
  
Actually, he had been. He was an idiot of the highest order and an unimaginative one, obviously. Sulu fiddled with his bottle some more, at a loss for words, then pulled the file from his messenger bag. He pushed it across the table at Kirk. “Here.”  
  
Kirk stared at it as if it were a bomb. “What’s this?”  
  
“Preliminary report on Tamura. From McCoy, surprisingly. I think he’s got an in with the ME, maybe knows him from med school, or something.” He told him what McCoy had said about the forensics.  
  
“How’d you –”  
  
“McCoy really doesn’t hate you, he just really... doesn’t like you.” If he was hoping this would make some of Kirk’s usual good humor return, the hope wavered and collapsed altogether at the look on Kirk’s face as photos spilled out of the file across the table and glared up at them in gory detail like accusatory eyes. Until he realized with growing horror, too late, that the frozen look had changed, crumpled. Kirk was crying.

A mistake. He’d made a horrible mistake, springing the file on Kirk like that. As the lead investigator, Kirk had to see all the gory details sooner or later, but Sulu had all the timing of an idiot. Kirk was in no way responsible for the death of a girl he hadn’t seen in years – and didn’t _that_ just bring up issues with conflict of interest that he had no desire to mention at the moment – but he’d misjudged badly.  
  
'Misjudged', nothing. This one was out of the ballpark and into the bleachers of Fucked Up Big.  
  
Fuck.  
  
"Um," he started, swiping at the case file like an idiot. But Kirk was already looking away and blinking hard, obviously going for the 'this never happened' gambit. Sulu let him, busily cleaning up the folder and the spilled photos and accidentally knocking his beer bottle off the table so he had to duck underneath to go after it.  
  
"Give me the file," Kirk said when Sulu came back up, and Sulu stilled.  
  
"You sure, man? Are you going to be alright? I mean, not that you're not, but I don’t think–"  
  
"I said, give me the file," Kirk repeated. His voice was hoarse but steady. "I was just – It was a shock."  
  
"Dude."  
  
" _Dude_."  
  
"Seriously?"  
  
Kirk’s eyes met his. "Hikaru."  
  
Sulu gave up, his heart sinking. "Fine."  
  
Kirk paged through the file slowly, studying each page and paper-clipping each photo neatly back in place without reaction as if determined to prove to himself that he could. Sulu watched him from the corner of his eyes, cringing inwardly with each quiet slide of paper, but Kirk's expression only set deeper into impassivity. 

He reached the end, then closed the folder and didn’t say anything for a moment.  
  
Sulu opened his mouth to ask – he didn’t know what he was going to ask. _Are you okay?_ was so inane. He knew what the folder held. 

But Kirk shook himself before he could get a word out. With all his usual cheer, such a total 180 that Sulu was stunned, Kirk said loudly, "So. Drinks? No more beer, Hikaru. Tequila shots all around. Let’s _do_ this.”  
  
That smile pinched off the moment Sulu started to protest – they had work the next day, drinking to cope with the job was quite probably the worst thing a cop could do, et cetera. Kirk put his fingers to Sulu’s lips to shut him up. “Don’t.” It came out low, barely audible over whatever song was queued on the karaoke machine at the moment. “Just go with me on this.”  
  
This was an epically bad idea. Sulu knew it with every fiber of his being, knew he should be the bigger man and put an end to this before it even got started. He was quickly finding that sometimes, you go along with bad ideas because you can’t think of any way to say no.


	2. Chapter 2

“Mrs. Lee, thank you for agreeing to talk to me over the phone. Once again, I want to express my condolences about Tamura—“  
  
Sulu looked up. Kirk’s expression was pinched and he was worrying at a pen. Sulu had offered to do the family interviews, but Kirk had seemed to go deaf whenever he’d brought the subject up.

His head was killing him and he was more than vaguely nauseated, but he tried to ignore the hangover and concentrate back on his own work, sorting through the autopsy report. In addition to being strangled, Tamura had been stabbed multiple times in the abdomen and three times in the thighs and arms. The shortest but deepest slice had severed the femoral artery, and would have been cause of death except – He frowned and flipped back a few pages to study the diagram. There had been defensive wounds all over her hands and arms. No evidence of sexual assault. Thank god for small favors. 

A savage attack, a passionate one, meant the motivation was probably personal. Most likely someone she knew. Sulu forced himself to look at the photos for a long time, memorizing her face. She looked too much like Akiko.

“—Yes. I apologize for not being able to deliver the news in person, but –“

They’d put out feelers into the media, asking for witnesses. Hundreds of tips had come in, most of them as bogus as a three dollar bill. It would take time to sort through them all; in the meantime, they were gleaning what they could from the family and friends. 

A burst of sound, shrill. Sulu winced as the sound drilled straight through his head. Kirk sat up straighter.

“What makes you say that? I – Okay. Okay. Do you happen to have a name, an address, maybe?” Kirk nodded and scribbled on his steno pad as Sulu vainly tried to read the crabbed script upside down.  
  
“Okay. Okay. Thank you, we’ll definitely follow up on this. Yes. I’ll be in touch.” He hung up and sat back for a moment, rubbing his forehead with a hand. 

“A lead?” Sulu prompted.  
  
“Damn,” Kirk said as if to himself. “Damn, _damn!_ ” He pounded on the desk, making the mug of pens rattle. “I knew it.”

“Kirk. If you have a lead from the family, please share.”

Kirk was typing on his computer and appeared to not have heard a word he’d said. This was annoying. He was about to ask again with louder volume when Kirk swiveled the monitor around so he could see. 

Sulu squinted, wishing he’d picked up some aspirin on the way in. The monitor kept blurring and doubling in his vision, and each attempt to focus just redoubled his migraine. “I give up. Who is that?” 

“Emilio Mihara. Small time drug dealer, originally based in LA, now paroled out. I had a few run-ins with him while I was on patrol in LAPD. Him and Tamura used to date, way back when. Her parents said she kept in touch with him after she moved here, _and,_ ” satisfaction colored his voice, “fingered him as the main suspect.” 

Sulu reached over and tapped a few keys, trying to read the small font. Kirk was _way_ too chipper considering he’d outdrunk Sulu two to one. “He’s only been in for felony drug possession.” That didn’t really ping the guy as a violent offender, but then one never really knew. “What’s he doing in our city?” 

“That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? You feeling okay, ‘Roo? You keep squinting.” 

Sulu flapped a weary hand at him to continue. “Please don’t call me that. I hate that nickname.” 

“Pavel uses it?” 

“Yeah, I hate him too.” 

Kirk laughed. He sounded almost giddy. “Anyway. Her dad said she had a stalker, probably an ex-boyfriend. Sent her weird emails, creepy presents in the mail, stuff like that.” 

“What, you think he followed her here?”

“Could be. He was caught again for drug possession, got paroled, then disappeared.” 

Sulu frowned and looked down at the file. “She never filed a complaint?” 

“Well, no. But it’s a lot weird for a drug dealer to just up stakes and move somewhere else. They usually stay on known territory unless they get in trouble and have to run for it.” 

“Or they want to start over.” 

Kirk shook his head. “I’ll check with LAPD. They’ll know if he got in hot water down there.” 

ooo 

 

It was almost as if Tamura Lee’s discovery unleashed a flood of insanity in the city. Within a week, the division was flooded with murders – three gang-related, one mugging-gone-wrong, and one where a beleaguered woman beat her abusive husband’s head in with a bat. It would’ve been nice if they could have concentrated on one case at a time, but unfortunately life wasn’t as easily compartmentalized as the cop shows on television, and now they had one more added onto their already overflowing plate. 

Sulu wished he’d worn something besides his nice shoes and suit pants later as he slipped and slid down the dirt slope to a tiny, almost inaccessible beach at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. His shoes had traction, but they’d never been meant for hiking, and he had to grab at shrubbery as he inched his way long. A blanket of dun-colored dust covered him from the knees down and he was sweating under the brilliant sun. Kirk, comparatively more practically dressed for off-roading in khakis and – oddly – boots of some fashionable but still practical cut, had already reached the bottom and turned back to offer Sulu a hand. He ignored it. 

The vic, Ravi Mehta, was a young South-Asian man in his mid-twenties. He’d fallen – or, most likely, jumped – off the bridge, and had missed the water entirely. It wasn’t pretty; he was pretty much flattened and jagged bones stuck out of his skin every which way like a grotesque pin-cushion. Cause of death was pretty obvious, and so was motivation. The Golden Gate Bridge had the dubious distinction of being one of the most popular places to commit suicide in the world after all. 

“Why’d you call us down here?” Sulu demanded of a patrol officer who was standing nearby, looking bored. Kirk made no move to touch the body, he noted with some approval. “Looks like suicide to me.” 

“Sorry to interrupt your beauty rest. Thought we’d give you some exercise,” the officer said with heavy sarcasm. “But the vic didn’t jump. We’ve got a witness who says he was pushed.” 

He could’ve mentioned that sooner, Sulu thought irritably, taking a new interest in the scene. 

As they were working their way back up the slope later, which sucked even more than going down, Kirk panted, “My contacts down south said Mihara just vanished from LA and turned up in SF. They don’t know why he left.” 

“Great. So how are we going to locate this guy? Nobody knows where he is.” 

“I’ve got CI’s everywhere. They’ll find him.” 

“Or he’ll have made for Mexico by now.” 

“You know, I really don’t think so. Most perps stick around town. They don’t like leaving their comfort zone, and they’re short on planning, long on stupid impulses. You learn that after a while.” 

Sulu could live without the condescension, thank you very much. They were nearly at the top of the steep hill and he threw himself into the final stretch, anticipating a long and fruitful date in the car with handi-wipes, but then a particularly strong gust of wind off the Pacific combined with the dirt slipping under his shoes, and over he went. 

Windmilling his arms, he backslid, snatching at air. Just as he was certain that he was going to plummet off the cliff and wind up a smear on the rocky bluff just like that unfortunate soul they’d come here for in the first place, Kirk caught him under the arms and pushed him forwards again. 

Sulu clung to a bush and panted, weak-kneed. God, that’d been too close. He generally didn’t mind heights. Shit, he had gone bungee-jumping and zip-lining plenty of times before, and he was a certified pilot, but heights with the prospect of going splat? Hell no. 

“Shit, ‘Roo, haven’t you ever gone hiking?” 

Sulu gritted his teeth. “I _do_. All the time. I can outhike _you_ anyday, once I’m not wearing this stupid suit!” 

“I like your suit. It looks good on you.” The teasing had gone out of Kirk’s voice. 

“Uh. Thanks?” 

“And I accept your challenge. And up the stakes with fifty bucks.” A hearty slap on Sulu’s back made him jump and nearly slip again. 

“Fine, done,” Sulu snapped. “First person who wants to stop, loses.” 

“This Saturday morning? At say, nine? At Rancho San Antonio?” 

“Why do you get to pick the pla –“ he began, then stopped. “Whatever, fine.” Rancho was one of his favorite hiking spots anyway, with a good mix of beginner and more advanced trails, and plenty of parking. 

“You’re picking me up, right? Eight o’clock, bright’n early.” 

“You wish.” 

ooo

  
  
There was a twitch of the lace curtain in the window of the pink stucco cottage. They waited a full minute before the door opened and Mrs. Nguyen peered through the door. “Can I help you?” She was a small woman, hair impeccably permed and dyed, with a lined face older than her years.  
  
Her suspicion was odd for this upscale neighborhood in the Mission area, but then she hadn’t received much good news lately. And they _were_ two men and not exactly obviously cops. 

Sulu held up his badge and the tension in her face eased. Interesting. “Mrs. Nguyen? You’re Tamura’s aunt, right? We’re detectives from SFPD. Can we speak inside?” 

Her eyes flicked to Kirk, who was surveying the yard and the neighboring houses with casual interest, then back to Sulu. Sulu had tried his best to smooth out the wrinkles and dirt on his suit back at the precinct, but there was little he could really do. They’d decided Sulu would be the one to handle the face-to-face family interviews and the tactic seemed to work: she nodded and held the door open for them.  
  
The living room was pleasantly crammed to overflowing with stacks of magazines, newspapers, and cracker tins. She bustled around, offering them coffee, then tea, then juice, then despite their protests came out of the kitchen bearing a tray of sliced fruit. Kirk continued to protest about being full from breakfast until Sulu stepped on his foot.  
  
The hospitalities done, she sat down and looked at them expectantly.  
  
Sulu put his slice of melon down and cleared his throat. Before he could say anything, she said, “You want to know if she had anybody who wanted to hurt her.”  
  
“Uh….yeah.” Damn Law and Order and all the procedural shows like it. Their popularity was both a blessing and curse; it meant the police and their ways were accessible to the public for some generally positive PR; on the other hand, investigatory procedures were no longer a mystery and they were second-guessed a lot. By everybody.  
  
“I guess you’d know.” She said this to Kirk. “Tam had…trouble when she was growing up. In high school, she turned wild, very wild. Did drugs, partied too much, had the wrong kind of boyfriends. Her parents sent her to rehab a couple times, then sent her up here to live with us. She seemed to turn around…” Her voice trailed off. She waved Sulu off before he could offer her a Kleenex and sat up straighter. “She enrolled at USF. But you want to know who wanted to hurt her? I don’t know. She knew too many of the wrong kind of people, doing the wrong things, maybe she got back into it here? Maybe one of her old boyfriends found her.”  
  
“Did she seem scared of anyone before she disappeared? Was she dating anyone?”  
  
Mrs. Nguyen looked down at her hands. “I couldn’t tell you. She had night classes. I work during the day and sometimes on the weekends, so we didn’t see a lot of each other except in the mornings and the weekends. Tamura did mention a boy in her night class. Matt? Matthew?” She shook her head. “I think they were dating. I’ve been thinking about it ever since she disappeared, and – I don’t know. I’m sorry, I wish I remembered better. Why didn’t I pay attention?” Spoken bitterly, self-recrimination in every syllable.  
  
Kirk spoke up now. “Her parents said that she might have kept contact with an old boyfriend from LA,  Emilio Mihara. Do you know him?”  
  
“She told me she wasn’t into all that anymore. I don’t know, maybe?” She was crying, except it wasn’t exactly crying. Crying was too strong a term for it; _leaking_ was what it was, dry sobs shaking her body with every inhale. Sulu could only stare mutely at her, but Kirk took her hand and she leaned into him. Sulu was bad with crying people. He seemed to grow twelve thumbs and never knew where to look.

Kirk continued. “Was she—did she ever receive anything that you or she thought was strange? Like letters or items in the mail? Did anything seem weird to you before she disappeared?” 

She thought for a moment, then shook her head. “She was normal. You have to understand, she was sent to us because she said she wanted to start over. She did. We gave her as much freedom as we could, but you have to understand that she was still earning our trust again. If she was behaving strangely or like the way she was before, we would have noticed.“ 

“Is your husband home? Can we speak to him?” 

“He’s at work. He probably doesn’t know much more. He and Tamura weren’t that close.” Sulu and Kirk looked at each other. The aunt wasn’t being much help, although she was trying. 

“Would you mind if we had a look in her room?” 

Tamura’s room was a fashionista’s wet dream; expensive clothes strewn over every available surface, shoes crammed into every available corner, jewelry and makeup scattered across her dresser and desk in a muted multi-colored spectrum. Kirk whistled. 

For all that it was messy, the room was strangely impersonal. Sulu spent a moment pondering why before the reason came to him—there was nothing here that showed that a _personality_ lived here; no photos, no keepsakes, no random bric-a-brac that most people picked up like burrs in their journey through life. It could have been the changing room of a department store. 

Except – Kirk plucked something out of the trash. “How long has this been here?” he asked, holding up a bouquet of faded flowers. The daisies and other annuals had withered to the point of disintegration, but the roses had held up better and were still faintly red. 

Her aunt said, “I haven’t touched anything since she disappeared. A week ago.” She looked around. It was eerily quiet. The room had begun to take on the still, dusty quality of disused spaces. “I kept thinking that maybe she’d come back. That I’d come in here and she’d be listening to music or chatting on her computer…” 

“Computer?” Kirk looked at her. 

“She had a black laptop, some sort of Apple, I think? I’m sorry, I don’t know much about computers.” 

“Do you know where it is?” 

She shook her head. “Tamura used to take it to school with her.” 

Kirk’s eyes met Sulu’s and they shared a simultaneous thought – there had been nothing found with the body, including clothing. The murder site hadn’t been found yet. 

“Did you or her parents give Tamura an allowance?” Sulu asked casually. 

“Only a little, maybe thirty a week for food and gas.” 

“Did she have a job?” Kirk’s eyes remained on him as Sulu asked the question. 

“Maybe, but I don’t think she had time. She had too many classes. She was – she was—this is so unfair, that this had to happen to her –” Kirk nodded, and impulsively, she hugged him. “My sister never liked you, I know. But I think now we all know you were one of the best things to happen to her, hm?” 

ooo 

 

“What was that about?” Sulu asked as they were walking back to the car. They’d left a business card for Tamura’s uncle to call them back. He kept his voice low, in case Mrs. Nguyen was watching them from the window. 

“Hm?” 

“That bit about you being the best thing that ever happened to Tamura. What was that?” 

“I knew her in LA, remember,” Kirk said in a chiding tone. 

“Yeah, but –“ Sulu paused, too unsure how to articulate his thoughts. Maybe he was reading too much into the aunt’s comment. “You notice another thing,” he continued, changing the subject. “She had a lot of designer clothes. Really high end ones we’d have to sell a kidney for. Like Gucci, Akris Punto, McQueen. You know how much Louboutin shoes go for? Or Louis Vuitton purses?“ 

“How do _you_ know?” Kirk was smiling now, though his face was still shadowed, as if he wasn't sleeping very well. 

“My older sister. She’s totally into that stuff. You kind of pick it up by, I don’t know, osmosis after a while.” 

“I had a girlfriend once, way back,” Kirk said thoughtfully. “For about three years. If osmosis is true, how come she never picked up anything football in three years besides ‘those hot guys in the spandex tights’? 

“My point being,” Sulu said with heavy patience. “If she didn’t have a job, and she only got thirty dollars a week for expenses, how did she afford all that? On top of that, what did she need night classes for? What did she do all day?” 

 “Look.” Kirk pulled out a square card with a flowered border and _Thinking of you_ written on the bottom in a barely legible script. “What do you make of this?” 

“Have you told the lieutenant about you being, I don’t know, friends with the vic?” Sulu asked abruptly, realizing out of the blue that he still didn’t know what Kirk and Tamura had been. Friends? Maybe, though Kirk hadn’t spoken of her in those terms. What else would have made this case so personal to someone like him? Kirk was one of those overfriendly people who seemed to get along with everybody and seemed to know everyone, but when all was said or done it was impossible to tell who they truly liked, and who they didn’t. 

Because Sulu was pretty much the polar opposite.  Being intensely private and quiet not out of shyness but disinclination, he simply didn’t understand people like Kirk. 

What had been different about this girl? 

 “I will,” Kirk replied, as if it was no big deal. “No worries.” 

“When? You have to cover us in case something goes wrong, dude. Full disclosure. The lieutenant has to know about this. I’m serious.” 

“Yeah, yeah, I will. Take a look at this now. What do you think?” 

Sulu took it reluctantly, careful to only handle the edges. “Where’d you get this?” 

“The flowers in the trash can. Doesn’t it make you wonder – there was no vase, the flowers were pretty fresh. They were thrown away before they faded, and thrown hard, too. The stems were broken. And there’s this note with no name. What does that tell you?” Only two weeks ago, his tone would have gotten Sulu’s back up, suspecting that he was mocking him, but he decided now that Kirk was being honestly curious. Whatever devious talents Kirk had, it wasn’t in the passive-aggressive range. 

“Well. Hella bad handwriting aside, it’s creepy,” Sulu mused, fingering the card. It was even faintly scented with cologne. “Looks like male handwriting, though don’t quote me on that.” He looked up into Kirk’s anticipatory eyes. “Fresh flowers violently thrown away, means they weren’t welcome. No name. You’re thinking this is from an ex-boyfriend?” 

Kirk gave him a tight smile. “Or a stalker.” 

ooo 

 

Saturday morning. Sulu was flying high on a Red Bull and the complaints that punctuated the air behind him. As a rule, he refused to get up early on the weekends, or any day that he didn’t specifically have to be at work at 8 am, but he was particularly glad he’d made the effort this morning. Waking Kirk’s ass up at five with a phone call to be sure he wouldn’t be late and meeting Kirk’s sour, puffy face with a maniacal energy that would mandate a nap in the afternoon had been more than worth it. 

“Christ. Did I ever mention how much I hate hills?” Kirk panted. “And high places?” 

“Only the last thirty gajillion times,” Sulu said, turning around and walking backwards to watch Kirk chug his way up the slope, a determined look on his face. It was a beautiful morning, and they’d gotten there early enough that the early mist was just beginning to burn off. There was a delicious chill in the air. A ten mile course, it wasn’t even all that much of a challenge as trails went, and at least there was shade. He usually went with his triathlon team on Mission Peak in Fremont, which was, simply put, _insane_. People went hang-gliding off the mid-point of the trail, it was so high. 

Today, to Sulu’s secret relief, for the first time in days Kirk looked like he was actually _here_. Alive and present. Dusty and pissed off at Sulu for dragging him out into the middle of nowhere on his day off, but his cheeks had color, his expression had animation, and he wasn’t lost in some no-man’s-land of brooding guilt, his normally ebullient personality muted as if he were going through the motions underwater. 

“That. That’s not even a real number.”

“Come on, Kirk. I thought you said you were good at this. You need a tow?” He laughed aloud when Kirk gave him a glare, then turned and sprinted up a few yards to rub it in. A long stream of profanities colored the air behind him. He was enjoying this. 

The profanities came steadily closer, in an almost rhythmic chant. Sulu looked back to see Kirk, having drawn on a last reservoir of strength, doing the 500 meter dash up the hill at him. Head up, blue eyes bulging with the effort, panting and blowing like a rhino. Kirk, he was finding to his delight, was a massive sore loser. 

Sulu laughed. Laughed loudly, letting Kirk see the smile that he was always telling him to wear, then turned and raced him up the trail. 

“God, I don’t hate hills, they can’t help being hills, but I hate _you_ ,” Kirk groaned later. 

They were in a Starbucks in Los Altos, quite probably stinking up the place. Rivulets of sweat cut clean paths through the dirt streaked on Kirk’s face. Sulu was sure he didn’t look – or smell – much better. They were getting weird looks from the other patrons, most likely because Kirk was listed seriously to one side, his temple was swollen from a bee sting, and he hadn’t stopped complaining since the moment they’d entered the coffee-shop. 

“Hey, you forfeited the bet when you attacked me like a wild animal. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.” 

“I _tripped._ While running from homicidal bees, might I add. And fell on you. I think I deserve some sympathy.” Kirk wasn’t smiling. He was, in fact— 

“Are you sulking? HA! You are! The great Jim Kirk is totally sulking! Because–” he thumped himself on the chest. “You hate losing. To me. Because I am awesome. Awesomer than you. Bwa ha ha.” 

Kirk muttered, “Shut up,” and pointedly turned to the waiting barista, a skinny college-type who looked nervously between the two of them as if they were a new species of freak, and ordered a strawberry cream frappuccino. 

Sulu mocked him for that too because it was pink and frothy with no redeeming dollop of caffeine whatsoever. When he in turn ordered an americano, Kirk griped, “It’s a watered down espresso, you coffee fiend,” and in the ensuing argument in which Sulu nearly knocked over an entire rack of gift cards defending himself from Kirk’s rabbit punches, he nearly missed the barista patiently and repeatedly asking for a name. 

Without thinking, he said _Jim_ , because _Jim_ was just an easier name, an easier to give name than his own. Which was when he realized he’d been thinking of _Kirk_ as _Jim_ and he didn’t know when that had changed.

Kirk caught it, of course he did. For all that he was impulsive and garrulous and very good at pretending to be a doof, he missed very little. But he only gave Sulu a secret little smile, and the moment passed.

ooo

  
  
On the other hand, Kirk had always called him _Hikaru_ from the beginning.

Jerk.

 

ooo

  
  
The classmate was young, shooting nervous little glances around to see if anyone walking by was noticing his little walk o’ shame with two dudes who were obviously cops, and Sulu had time to wonder if he’d ever been that callow. 

After a two hour wait for a court order to access Tamura’s university records and class rosters, they’d narrowed the list of classes down to three. From there, there’d been only so many classes offered on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 7:30pm, and then only one ‘Matthew Dinshaw.’ Elementary, my dear Watson. Sulu was quite proud of himself.  
  
After an abortive stop at Dinshaw’s apartment in which no one seemed to know who they were talking about – “reclusive subleasers,” Kirk had said disgustedly – they’d tracked down one of his professors, and from there, gotten an idea of his class schedule.  
  
They waited outside the brick Humanities building in early afternoon and paid too much for a tuna sandwich from a cart by the main foyer from a cashier named Precious. They shared it between themselves, sitting on the grass until the class ended and the students streamed out.  
  
Picking Dinshaw out of the crowd was easy; he got one look at them, two men in suits and ties and shoulder holsters who were obviously not faculty and even more obviously not students, and booked it across the quad.  
  
“Go left!” Sulu shouted, and took a shortcut, hurdling several picnic benches and students on the way, and whirled around the corner of the library just in time to slam full into the kid, knocking him flat onto his back.  
  
“That was stupid, really stupid,” he breathed into the kid’s frightened face, and hauled him up. Kirk caught up to them then, looking extremely impressed. “Now we’re gonna have to take you downtown.”  
  
Dinshaw looked even younger as he fidgeted at the interrogation table. Pale, bleached blonde, brown eyes, almost dwarfed by his oversized clothes on his skinny frame. He was possibly the least likely-looking homicide suspect ever, but Sulu had learned early in his police career that it took all kinds in the parade of people who did all the fucked up things people did to each other for no discernible reason at all.  
  
“Matthew Dinshaw. Matt, right?” Kirk smiled, tone light, easygoing. Friendly. He was sitting across the table from him. Shuffling through some papers as if reading notes, carefully not letting the kid see. It made Dinshaw visibly nervous. Good.  
  
“Why’m I here?” His voice trembled.  
  
“Did he ask for counsel?” McCoy asked Sulu, as they stood inside the observation room. The glass was soundproofed, but he kept his voice low.  
  
“No, not yet,” Sulu replied. “You familiar with the case?”  
  
McCoy nodded. Kirk continued to stare at the kid as if he could hollow out his brain with his eyes. The kid looked shifty, uncertain. Something about this kid didn’t ring true to Sulu; he _looked_ scared, but he brought to mind a possum, that pretended death until the predator finished snuffling around and moved on. It was something in his eyes, a barest hint of sneering contempt.  
  
“Her parents think she had a stalker, possibly an ex-boyfriend. The aunt thinks she had a boyfriend at school. The uncle – we just talked with him on the phone – also thinks she had a boyfriend, but he said he’d listened in when she got calls on the house line and said he sounded older. Two names came up – a previous boyfriend, location currently unknown, and…this kid. Apparently her boyfriend.”  
  
“Right, right,” McCoy murmured, absently. “It’s always the goddamn boyfriend. Nobody’s original anymore.” He was chewing his knuckle. Chekov came up behind them and handed them both coffee.  
  
“This is just an information gathering interview,” Kirk said. “We’re just trying to get some idea of what happened, and why. For the record, you’re not under arrest, and you can leave anytime you want. Anything you say here can be used in court, or you can just say nothing at all. You can also ask for a lawyer at any time. Okay?”  
  
“I didn’t do anything,” Dinshaw mumbled at the table.  
  
“We’re not saying you did. Let’s just talk. Why’d you run?”  
  
He said nothing, only quivered as if threatened with torture. Oh, the kid was good, Sulu thought. A future Academy Award winner. Kirk seemed to have fallen for the act, hook, line, and sinker.   
  
“Look.” Sulu couldn’t have come up with a more genuinely sympathetic tone if he’d tried. Add that to the list of things Kirk was awesome at, Sulu thought to himself even as he leaned against the one-way window and ignored his coffee. “I gotta be honest with you, it looks bad. But I’m sure it’s all just a misunderstanding. We just want to help her family, her friends, by figuring out what happened to her. If you explain it to us, I’m sure we can just move past this and get you out of here, okay?”  
  
The kid looked distrustfully up at Kirk through his eyelashes, who beamed back. The moment Dinshaw melted was almost palpable. Sulu didn’t trust his sudden capitulation one bit.  
  
“Damn, he’s good,” McCoy said, and took a slurp of the sludge the office coffee machine dared to call coffee.

“Who?” 

“What? Kirk. Look at that. Instant rapport in less than five minutes.” 

“Oh. Yeah. Yeah, tell me about it,” Sulu muttered. “How does he do that?”  
  
“He’s Jim Kirk,” McCoy said, and Sulu realized he meant it entirely unironically. McCoy winked at him, and in his dumbfounded shock Sulu missed Dinshaw telling Kirk that he had unpaid parking tickets. 

It was a mistake, telling such an obvious, easily verifiable lie. They’d pulled his rap sheet first thing, and the kid was clean. Squeaky clean, as if he’d gone through a carwash with the deluxe wax package. So claiming he’d run because of some bunk excuse like parking tickets – as if they wouldn’t have just towed his car instead of questioning or arresting him, if that were the case – pissed Sulu right the fuck off.  
  
It seemed to incense Kirk too, who smiled like a cat stalking a songbird, then lunged forward with no warning and seized the kid by his collar. The hipster flannel button-down tore with a little purr. “Don’t _lie_ , asshole,” Kirk hissed, two inches away from the kid’s face, who looked like he was about to shit his designer skinny jeans. It was the first truly genuine reaction Dinshaw had evinced ever since he’d sat down in that room. Consummate liar he was, but he was still young, and still practicing.

“Huh,” said Chekov. McCoy just stared intently at the scene playing out before them.

The coffee sloshed over Sulu’s hand as he squeezed the cup too hard, nearly burning him as his mind raced. He couldn’t tell if this was an act or if Kirk really had lost control. If it was the former, he’d be messing up whatever mind-game Kirk was playing with the kid if he went barging in there; if it was the latter, he could be saving them both a whole truckload of trouble.  
  
While Sulu was torn in indecision, Kirk stared into the kid’s terrified eyes, their breath mingling, harsh over the staticky audio coming over the speakers. Then he abruptly dropped the kid back into his seat and sat down himself, smoothing down his tie. It was almost schizophrenic, the way he smiled so kindly, full of friendliness and bonhomie, as if the previous Kirk leaned over the interrogation table with rage-reddened face, pulsing veins, murderously icy blue eyes, had been a hallucination. Goosebumps rippled up Sulu’s arms.  
  
“I take it back,” McCoy said. “What the holy blue fuck does Kirk think he’s doing? Now the kid’s gonna lawyer up. Idiot.”  
  
But Dinshaw didn’t. Instead, he eyed Kirk with a new respect and looked almost willing to be helpful. After a moment, Kirk continued in the same conversational tone that he’d begun with, “So, about Tamura. You were dating?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“How long?”  
  
“Fifteen months, three weeks, two days. We met in class.”   

“You have a very precise memory.” 

“What can I say, I’m a romantic guy.”

“You met at USF.”  
  
“Yeah, German class. I asked her to tutor me.”  
  
They went back and forth for a while. Sulu gnawed on the edge of his sytrofoam cup. After Kirk’s little performance, he wouldn’t trust Kirk as far as he could throw him, but Kirk’s oddball tactic seemed to have worked. Dinshaw began to relax a little, weirdly, though he still wasn’t as forthcoming as Sulu would have liked for a supposedly innocent person. He was proving to be one of those people who weren’t good at _telling_ , at giving information beyond the bare facts, although it was hard to tell how much of that was deliberate obfuscation. 

Kirk drew him out though, and eventually got him to admit that he’d known Tamura bit longer than that – they’d taken German 2A together and were in 2B before he’d worked up the courage to talk to her – and as far as he knew, she had no enemies. She was older than him by five years, but they hadn’t cared for that. Then she was supposed to have come home from class by 8pm, and simply hadn’t.

“Can you write her class schedule down for me? And maybe any friends she might’ve seen on the way home?” Kirk put a notepad and a pencil in front of the boy. Dinshaw shrugged and began writing.

“Did you report her missing?”  
  
“I—“ he hesitated, and the listening detectives all straightened with sharp interest. “I didn’t live with her.”  
  
Kirk pressed on. “But didn’t you talk to her often? You didn’t check up on her when you didn’t hear from her?”  
  
Dinshaw shook his head. “She didn’t like talking on the phone. She was one of those people who never answered her phone and just called you back on her own time, if she felt like it or didn’t forget.” A tinge of anger entered his voice, unconsciously.  
  
Kirk heard it. Pressed his advantage. “I bet that made you angry.”  
  
The kid withdrew into himself. “No. I loved her. When – when she didn’t call me, I just waited. I’d done it before. Sometimes she’d go weeks before calling me back.”  
  
“Most passive wuss-ass boyfriend ever,” McCoy grunted.  
  
“Don’t you have people to arrest?” Sulu asked him.  
  
“So who did report her missing?” Kirk wanted to know, his voice velvety with sympathy so convincing Sulu couldn’t tell if he was faking it.  
  
The kid’s voice broke. “I don’t know, her mom?”

“When was the last time you saw her?” 

“Class.” 

“Which class?” 

“Same one as usual.” 

“Which one is that?” 

“Um. It’s a practicum. For all Art History majors. Tuesdays at five.” 

“Where were you the evening of Tuesday, June 24?” 

Dinshaw had regained his equilibrium and glanced over at the one-way window, that faint sneer tugging at his thin features again. “At class. Then at home for dinner.” 

“And the next morning at 9?” 

“Class. Go ahead and check.” 

Kirk leaned in. “You just have all the answers, don’t you?” 

The door opened abruptly. Lieutenant Uhura entered, followed by a chubby man in a suit. “Interview’s over,” Uhura said. “This is Mr. Dinshaw’s lawyer.” 

“Are you charging him with anything?” the lawyer asked immediately. He had the appearance of a man who could never be bothered with details like shaving or whether his tie clashed with his suit, but his eyes flicked around the room, reading the body language, the recording apparatus, the cameras. “No? Then let’s go, Matthew. Your father is waiting.” 

“Good luck,” Dinshaw said, smirking, and left with his lawyer bringing up the rear.

ooo

  
  
“So what do you think?”  
  
“About life? Love? And everything in between?”  
  
“Jim.”  
  
“That’s _Detective_ Jim to you.”  
  
“So what do you think?”  
  
Kirk ate his fries like an automaton as he watched people go by on the sidewalk outside. “Kid couldn’t have done it. I’da scared it out of him otherwise.”  
  
Sulu, who’d been expecting quite the opposite response, nearly choked. “Are you serious?”  
  
“You asked.”  
  
“I asked, but—“ The kid _had_ been doing quite a snow job. Was it possible that Kirk hadn’t seen that? He took a deep, determined drink of his milkshake, which was really thick enough to choke a cow, so he made a weird fish face and a noise rather like a dying hippo. Kirk nearly busted a rib laughing. “Poodle-shoot,” Sulu said, when he was done spluttering.  
  
“Poodle- _what_?”  
  
Sulu glowered down at his burger. “I don’t swear. If you haven’t noticed.”  
  
“You are. So weird.”  
  
“So are you.”  
  
“I know you are but what am I?”  
  
“You’re weird times infinity!”  
  
“Ah. You are too.” Kirk grinned at him over his burger. “This is why we’re made for each other.”  
  
“Okay, children, you’re both pretty,” McCoy grumbled. “Now shut up, you’re interfering with my digestion.” He picked morosely at his salad, throwing venomous glares at their greasy burgers as if the food offended him on a fundamental level. Maybe the burgers had gone over to his house and knocked over his garbage cans, even.  
  
Sulu threw a fry into his mouth and chewed furiously.  
  
“So why don’t you think he did it?” Chekov asked, unashamedly sneaking fries off Kirk’s plate when he wasn’t looking because Chekov was too cheap to buy them for himself.  
  
“One: there’s no motive. Two, he’s a clean kid, has no record, gets good grades at school, and he’s got a bright future. Not the type. Three, he’s got an alibi, a good one.” 

“His mom?” Sulu said skeptically. 

“It’s the iron-clad ones I worry about, cuz someone had to work at it. Maybe set it up. She said he was at home, in his room and I have no reason to think she’s lying. And we can verify his classes the next morning. They keep rosters at the lower division level.” 

“Because kids have never snuck out or had their friends sign them in since the beginning of time?” 

 “ _Four_ ,” Kirk continued on with extra emphasis, “Like I said before, I woulda scared it out of him.”  
  
“You mean, beat it out of him,” McCoy said.  
  
“Bones, there’s a difference between scaring someone into respecting you and actually putting a hand on him,” Kirk said virtuously.  
  
McCoy rolled his eyes, totally unimpressed at Kirk’s semantics, and totally ignoring the gleam in Chekov’s eyes. An interrogation by Chekov was always worth watching; McCoy generally had little to do than look mildly bored standing there behind him, and maybe occasionally crack his knuckles. Chekov might be the youngest on the force to ever be promoted to detective, all big innocent eyes and curly brown hair bursting with eager energy, but criminals mistook the youthful exuberance only once. He looked like a pushover, the good cop to McCoy’s bad cop, but behind that youthful exterior hid an excitable temper and a love for punching things with sheer Russian élan. His broken knuckles – against walls next to suspects’ heads, on the steel tables, against windows – were testament to that.  
  
“You never did get a satisfactory answer from him about why he ran,” Sulu pointed out.  
  
“So he freaked. He’s young, probably doesn’t go out much. Kids do that.”  
  
“ _Guilty_ kids.”  
  
“He’s not the one.”

“Why are you denying that this—“

"Hey. Hey. _Hey_.” When he had their attention, Chekov smiled winningly. “You got a writing sample. Just wait until the analysis to the card comes back, okay? Anyway.” He sat back with the air of bringing up a matter of greater importance, “We haven’t really welcomed either of you properly to the department, yes? And it’s been more than a month, shame on us. We should take you out for a drink tonight. I mean, I took Roo out for drinks the night he got promoted, but it was just us and he got sick anyway.”

For a moment Kirk and Sulu just continued to glare at each other. 

It wasn’t worth arguing, Sulu decided finally. Forensics would tell, and until the results came back all they had was circumstantial evidence and hearsay. Nothing that would hold up in court. “Nobody sane can pound that many vodka shots in a row and live,” he said, tearing his attention away to Chekov. "Anyway, we did that already. My head’s still throbbing."  
  
"You did?" Chekov eyed him with interest. "You don’t drink."  
  
“My headache and your alcohol tolerance is why I don’t drink.”  
  
“Wait, who else went?"  
  
“Just us.” Kirk dug around in his burger and flicked onions onto Sulu’s plate. Sulu stuffed them into his own burger, and gave Kirk his pickles. 

Chekov watched all this with avid interest. “Alone? What’d you do, if you don’t drink, ‘Roo?” He leered.  
  
"Beer. I had beer. And we did karaoke."  
  
"You don’t sing."  
  
"You don’t know a lot about me, missy. Get your mind out of the gutter." Sulu smacked Chekov’s hand away from his cookie. "And quit stealing my food, moocher."  
  
“We could go again with everybody,” Kirk said carelessly, and crumpled up his burger wrapper. That done, he reached for the rest of his meal. He stopped. "Where’d my curly fries go?"

ooo 

 

It had to be a record for the shortest tenure ever before one’s partner had to take time off work – one months. ONE. 

Well, okay, Sulu revised in his head; there was no need to be so melodramatic. It was more like—wait. He consulted the calendar on his phone in disbelief. Had it been three months already? Where had the time gone? It wasn’t as if he’d been having fun. 

Not that much, at least. 

Having one of the lead investigators take a couple days off in the middle of an active investigation was hardly standard procedure, but Kirk had insisted. He didn’t lie about his reasons, either; he was going down for more in-depth interviews with the family and her former friends, he’d said. What Sulu wouldn’t have given to be a fly on the wall of that conversation with Uhura, but she’d granted it. Kirk could lie when it suited him, and this one hadn’t been a lie, not really. 

But in Sulu’s eyes, a half-truth was still a lie – he doubted like hell Uhura would’ve authorized Kirk to go anywhere near his old stomping grounds if she’d known that he was going to Tamura’s funeral, or that he and Tamura had been more than just passing acquaintances. 

He’d asked Kirk, just as he stopped outside the San Francisco airport car rental terminal, if he’d told Uhura yet. Kirk’s response was a vague nod, which reassured Sulu not at all. 

Kirk would be gone to LA for the funeral for two days. Sulu hadn’t dropped him off at the airport more than two hours before he got the call to the USF campus. 

There, in the depths of the ancient Biology building, behind a medical waste bin, they found her purse and clothing. No laptop, no phone, no mp3 player, no jewelry. Could this have been a mugging gone wrong? But then, he reasoned, why would the killer take her body along? He ordered an immediate search of the grounds, which turned up a quantity of blood residue and signs of a struggle, and her car in the parking lot. 

He called Mrs. Nguyen again. No, she said regretfully, she didn’t know what jewelry Tamura had been wearing that day. And her phone had been black and a bit blocky, not really sure what brand or carrier. No, she didn’t know who might have known those details. 

Sulu hung up, glumly. There was no way to place an alert to all the pawnshops and all the gray and black market places if they didn’t even know what to look for, all the aunt’s profuse apologies for her sheer unhelpfulness aside.  

He wished he could have a drink. But more than anything, he wanted to fly. He had a Cessna 210 Centurion stashed at the Oakland airport that he flew on weekends off and it was better stress relief than even sex, all the problems and the fucked up shit humans did to each other diminishing and falling far away as he escaped gravity. In the air, he could leave it all behind for a while, and just be. 

Instead, he dialed Kirk, who was barely audible over The Grateful Dead and apparently stuck in hours-long traffic on the 405 in Westwood, returning from the funeral. It was the worst possible time to tell Kirk this news, but he had to tell him. Sulu seemed to have a flair for bad timing. He thought he should have HARBINGER OF DOOM tattooed on his forehead. 

There was a moment of silence after he’d finished speaking, then the line went dead. 

Shortest partnership ever, and shortest phone conversation ever. Sulu was going for a record. 

ooo

  
  
His phone rang while he was watching _Hawaii 5-0._ The voice over the line told him something that made him sit up so fast he nearly fell out of his recliner. Spock sank all his razor-sharp claws into Sulu’s lap in disapproval before yowling off into the other room. 

“No!” he shouted, groping for the tv remote and his keys. “No, _no_ , you wait for me, you asshole – Jim? _Jim?_ Are you listening to me? Do _not_ —fuck.“   
  
It took thirty minutes at full speed in light traffic to get into the city. The street, in a run-down section of San Francisco, was clogged with double parked cars and pedestrians, and he was afraid he would be too late as he bumped over the curb, stealing someone’s parking spot as the other driver honked and yelled. “Better not key my car, jerk,” he hissed under his breath as he got out and went in search of the address Kirk had given him. 

Glory be, Kirk had listened to him. He was leaning against the doorway of a liquor store, casually drinking a Coke as Sulu puffed up. Obviously just arrived back in town, he was rumpled, red-eyed. He looked as if he’d been abusing Red Bull and living on gas station junk food. He’d only been gone two days, but that was twelve total hours of driving, and he looked like death warmed over. 

“Still better than you,” Kirk quipped, when Sulu said so. “You worry too much.” He was talking in that too-hearty, too-quick voice that Sulu had learned early on meant trouble. “Don’t you trust me?” 

The house he led him to was Edwardian, its former beauty now a splintered, dingy wreck that had once been painted a bright and cheerful (but no less ugly) forest green in long ago, happier days. A tarnished bronze _139_ adorned the worn door. 

“I trust you, I don’t trust the tip,” said Sulu, fingering his holster. The address had come from an old girlfriend of Emilio’s in LA with a beef. He really didn’t want to know what Kirk had said or done to get the information. 

Kirk gave the door a few thumps. Splinters of wood shivered through the air to land at their feet. 

“Take it easy,” Sulu said side-mouth. “You’ll break it.” 

“Of all the things to worry about,” Kirk replied tersely, and thumped on the door once more. “Hey! Open up!” 

“Jesus, what?” Irritated, sleepy. A thirty-something man, dark eyed and haired, blinked at Kirk. Kirk barely got out, “I’m from the San Francisco Police-“ before the man scrabbled backwards, slipping on the wooden floor, and was careering down the hall. 

ooo 

 

“Okay, okay, what the fuck, man?” Emilio’s nose was dripping where he'd run face-first into a door. He leaned forward and held a washcloth to his face. They were in the alleyway behind the house now, Emilio squatting on the dirty ground between them. 

“You made me tear my pants,” Sulu glared at him. “I liked these pants. And in about five seconds, you’re going to wish you’d liked them too.” 

“My partner here disapproves of footchases,” Kirk informed him helpfully, leaning in from behind. Between the two of them, Emilio was surrounded, sandwiched between them like the filling of an Oreo cookie. His eyes flicked around like a hunted creature’s.  “Especially ones where he has to climb fences in those ridiculous pants. So before I sic him on you, how about you help us out?” 

“I swear, I don’t know nothing about that robbery over on 12th. I don’t mess with that shit anymore.” He craned to have a better look at Kirk. “Do I know you?” 

“Yeah, you know me,” Kirk said grimly. “Why’d you run, Emilio, if you’re not sure?” 

Emilio gave them a cracked, bloody toothed smile. “Cuz I’ve got talent, I can spot assholes a mile away. But hey, I _do_ know you.” Full recognition dawned on his face. “Wait. You’re that cop. The crooked one who—“ 

Kirk shoved him flat onto his back, and dug a sharp knee into Emilio’s thigh, almost into his crotch. The man squealed and wriggled like a landed fish. 

Kirk slapped him hard. 

The sound of it, a sharp crack like a rifle shot, echoed in the alleyway. Even the normal clamor of the city seemed hushed, muted as Sulu thought, _Oh no_. Even Emilio was staring at him, wide-eyed, an irregular patch reddening on his cheekbone. 

“Wha—you’re crazy—“ Emilio whispered. He twisted to look up at Sulu. “Hey, you gonna do something here?” 

Kirk grabbed him by his shirt and hauled him up. “Listen to me, asshole. I know you killed her. And believe me, if you don’t tell me everything I want to know in the next thirty seconds, I will fucking make you sorry.” He shook him so hard Sulu could hear Mihara’s teeth rattle in his head like castanets. 

“Wha—who is _her_?” 

“Tamura Lee. Your girlfriend.” 

“Man, are you crazy? I haven’t seen that bitch in ages.” 

“Don’t you fucking dare _–_ “ 

“No, wait!” Emilio nearly screamed, his cool façade cracking, hands going up, probably catching the crazed glint in Kirk’s eye and the raised fist. Sulu had seen that glint too often in people who had long since ceased to have anything to lose. He lunged forward and seized Kirk by the wrist. 

“Let’s not do anything you’ll regret,” he said, fighting to keep his voice calm. He maintained an inexorable grip on Kirk, pulling him backwards with enough force that he was afraid he was leaving bruises, but he had to stop this – this _craziness_. The situation had spiraled inexplicably out of control, so very quickly. There were murky undercurrents here he was only beginning to glimpse. Kirk was unraveling in front of him, except unraveling wasn’t quite the right word – a better was _chipping_. Parts of him were flaking away, crumbling, and it was because of this case. The case was getting to Kirk, much more than it warranted, and this funhouse carnival ride needed to stop because Sulu wanted off.   

Kirk rounded on him. “Let me go.” 

“Okay – at the risk of sounding like McCoy, let’s answer this very philosophical question first: what the bloody blue _fuck_ are you doing?” 

With a violent convulsion, Kirk shook off his hand so hard they staggered apart. 

“We came here to conduct an interview, not – not whatever you think you’re doing!” 

“He did it. He’s got motive, he’s got a record, and you saw him, he looks guilty as –“ 

“Due process, have you heard of that? Why don’t we just arrest him on 24 hour hold so we can keep an eye on him while we investigate? Are you trying to shoot this case in the foot? Because it’s working!” 

“Fuck your due process!” 

At Kirk’s shout, Sulu stopped and just looked at him. He felt only a dim sadness. He’d come to like Kirk as a person, and they’d been slowly traveling the path to being friends, but this was a difference of the most fundamental kind. 

This wasn’t going to work out. 

He’d considered the possibility many times before, of course, but the thought had begun to recur less and less lately. Now it came back in full force, and – well. 

Then he noticed something. “Uh—where is—wait.“ They stared at each other for a dismayed second before turning their heads just in time to see Emilio disappearing around the corner. 

‘Around the corner’ turned out to be up a flight of stairs into a small kitchen that was painted a dismal shade of 70’s avocado. There was nowhere to go from there, but a gun had magically appeared in Emilio’s hand, and it was pointing at them. 

“Down!” Kirk yelled, and tackled Sulu. 

The gunshots were deafening in the small space. Sulu felt the hot wind of their passage, then splinters rained down over their heads as the bullets punched through drywall. Then the air seemed to swell and expand, and the world exploded around them. 


	3. Chapter 3

The precinct was unusually silent. People still bustled about, but they bustled quietly. Practically on their tiptoes, if Sulu wanted to be brutally honest with himself. Voices and conversations were hushed, every titter muffled with a quick glance around to where Kirk and Sulu were hunched over at their desks, trying to keep a low profile. Everyone knew they were in for The Big One. It was also hard to be inconspicuous when they smelled like they’d just escaped a wildfire and looked even worse. 

It was almost a relief when Lieutenant Uhura opened her office door and pointed her finger at them. "You two. Will you join me in here, please?" She smiled sweetly then added in a distinctly less friendly tone, “Now,” before disappearing again.

She closed the door behind them and seated herself with delicate care. Her desk was devoid of the towering stacks of papers and files that characterized everyone else’s desk, her office as pin-straight and neat as a military barracks except for a large plant by the window that was so perfectly healthy that it looked fake. She folded her hands and said, "So. How is your case on Tamura Lee coming along?" as casually as if she were asking about the weather.  
  
Neither of them were fooled. "What did you hear?" replied Kirk easily.  
  
"Oh, this and that. Some little things. Some big things. Some very illegal things. Oh, no need to look like that, Sulu," Uhura said. "Your good friend Chekov just gave me cow eyes and said he had no idea what I'm talking about. And McCoy gave me the total opposite and nearly seared my hide off for asking. Stone walls, both of them." She regarded them coolly, the lines beside her mouth deepening in displeasure. “And not particularly good at lying, either.” 

"It’s going fine," Sulu said, not exactly sure where this was all going. She – and probably everybody above her – knew about Emilio’s house going up in a fireball first thing in the morning, and its connection to their case. He wished she’d hurry up and get to the point. Were they reprimanded? Put on leave? Terminated? – so he could slink out that much faster, his tail between his legs, and cogitate on just how much this was all Kirk’s fault. And, in no small measure, also his, because he should have seen this coming, seen Kirk slowly coming unglued. “We’re still waiting on forensics, but we have some leads.”  
  
"So you," she said, pointing at Kirk, "conveniently not divulging that you knew the victim on a personal level isn’t supposed to be even a little bit suspicious?"  
  
“It’s not against the rules," Kirk answered without missing a beat. “It happens."

There went her eyebrow again. "A victim who happened to be your girlfriend years ago? Whose ex-boyfriend’s house just happened to blow up while you were on the premises?"

"Your _what_ _?"_ Sulu said, wheeling around to stare at him. 

A spasm of something crossed Kirk's face that neither Sulu or Uhura missed. "I don’t understand why this is an issue, _ma’am_."  
  
She seemed to be praying for patience. "Sulu, you can go."  
  
"No offense, ma’am, but I’d rather stay."  
  
She paused to look at him speculatively. "There's going be an ass-chewing of epic proportions that you don’t need to be here for."  
  
"I'm in for a bit of that ass-chewing, ma’am.” He caught the tail end of a surprised glance from Kirk at that, and his lips curled in sour amusement. Kirk had obviously expected him to bail on him. “We’re partners. You’re going to have to make it an order if you want me out."  
  
She stared at him for a long moment, then sat back with a sigh. "Well, aren’t you two cute. It’s breaking my heart. Can we stop with the ‘ma’am,’ though? All that false humility gives me the creeps. Just stop.” 

“Yes, ma’am. Sir.”  
  
“I have to give you credit, life’s never boring with you two around." She tapped her nails against the desk for a moment, deep in thought, then seemed to come to a decision.

"Boys, I'm going to lay this out for you nice and easy. We have a fair to good chance to catch this murderer,” she ticked one finger upwards, “ _if_ we lifted anything from the body or the car or the murder scene that can ID him,” – another finger – “ _if_ he hasn’t fled for the hinterlands by now. When we do catch this person, if there's even a whiff of the ex-boyfriend of the vic being involved in the investigation, the asshole walks.” She paused for emphasis. “Am I being clear, or should I use words with fewer syllables?"  
  
The muscle in Kirk's jaw was twitching again. "How’d you know about me and her?"  
  
"Honestly, Kirk. Keep up with the conversation, please? Captain Pike knew your dad from way back. I’m sure you know that, the captain helped you transfer here. He knows everybody to know down there in Los Angeles, including your old captain, so of course he has your entire personnel file, including the stuff that never made it onto paper.” She emphasized this last. Sulu watched, his head turning as if he were watching a tennis match. Kirk blanched. “So. Shall we move on?"  
  
She waited for both of them to nod. Sulu was beginning a slow burn, because he’d just gotten more information on Kirk in the last ten minutes than he’d gotten in their entire acquaintance previously. And just what was that last bit about? 

“In light of this conflict of interest, I really don’t see any alternative except to reassign this case.” She held up a hand before Kirk could get out more than the beginning of an indignant shout of rage. “No. No argument. You did bad, Kirk, and you know it, even if Captain Pike and the media weren’t breathing down my neck about that house that just happened to blow up while you were in it.” 

“It was a meth lab!” Kirk bellowed, making Sulu jump. “I keep telling you—“ 

“It was not,” she replied crisply. 

Her flat contradiction checked Kirk in mid-shout. “What?’ 

“If you’d bothered to do any due diligence before you went crusading in there like the world’s dumbest superhero, you might have found that he’d moved to this city to take care of his grandfather. Who wasn’t in the house, thank god, when his oxygen tanks exploded, otherwise your ass wouldn’t just be reassigned, it’d be terminated, maybe even charged with murder. What the hell is wrong with you?” 

For the first time as long as Sulu had known him, Kirk was at a loss for words. “Oh.” 

“So. When we catch this guy, I don’t want any static whatsoever from the defense lawyer about conflicts of interest, excessive force, or any kind of bullshit like that. This case gets tossed out of court, and you spend the rest of your lives on traffic duty. But more importantly, you’ll spend your lives knowing it’s your fault a murderer went free. You want that to happen?” Sulu’s portion of the hard stare she shared between them held an additional word: – _Again?_  
  
Kirk was trembling, his entire body quivering with fury, his face white and set, glaring at the lieutenant so hard Sulu was surprised the top of her head didn’t spontaneously combust. Sulu was none too happy himself.  
  
She repeated herself, steel in every word, “Do. You.”  
  
Sulu had to answer for the both of them. “No. Ma’am.”  
  
"So I don’t want to see you anywhere near this investigation. You stay clean, especially until the investigation into that house is done. Don’t fuck anything up. You have to be Twilight vampire _sparkling_. Do you get me?" At their grudging assent, she nodded but didn’t relax. "Don’t make me doubt your word. You’re good detectives and I don’t like not trusting my own people."

Then Uhura said something Sulu didn’t understand: “This is your second chance, James. Most cops in your position don’t get one, except Pike likes you. Don’t mess it up.”

Sulu half expected Kirk to flash that famous smile, to turn on his charm like a 200 watt lightbulb. Not that he expected it to work on Uhura, who’d always been someone not to be fucked with, but that had never stopped Kirk from trying before.

He obviously hadn’t even begun to plumb the depths of Jim Kirk as Kirk slammed out of the room without a further word or glance.  
  
Uhura didn’t even flinch, obviously a veteran of pissed people abusing her door. “Keep him out of trouble, Sulu,” she said, as the sounds of Kirk in a rage faded. “Make him see sense. Absolutely no vigilante rodeoing around. That includes you. Your career can’t handle another fuckup, either.” She gave him an unsmiling nod and waved him out.  
  
ooo

  
  
Sulu followed the path of sounds of things slamming and of doors swinging and of people staring curiously down the corridor and then back at him. Kirk must’ve been set to break world records for speed-walking, because even with Sulu trailing behind in his wake like a bloodhound, it took a good five minutes and a hefty dose of intuition to track him down.  
  
The room somebody had christened “The Room of Requirement” had once been an office only slightly bigger than a broom closet. Now decommissioned, it was equipped with cots for investigators pulling double shifts and with a door that locked for those seeking a quick wank or fuck, or something. It smelled vaguely of stale coffee, sour B.O., and overtime.  
  
The hollow thud he’d heard in the hallway turned out to have been Kirk’s hand, which, judging by the bleeding knuckles and the way Kirk was staring at it as if he’d just discovered something entirely new in the annals of the world, had lost a battle with the wall.  
  
“Um,” Sulu said, because he was eloquent like that and he’d meant to say that, instead of something like, _Hey, are you okay? Let me see_ because that would involve taking Kirk’s hand and a casual assumption of what they were. Or weren’t. He wasn’t ready for that right now, whatever ‘that’ was, but it definitely meant touching him and oh god there he went again, overthinking everything.  
  
“I’m just – ow.” Kirk said. He still had that dazed, stupid look on his face. “Jesus, _ow_.”  
  
“Is it broken?”  
  
“No?” He flexed his hand experimentally. “How does Pavel do that all the time?” The small joke unfurled a small knot in Sulu’s chest. Now he could move forward, take Kirk’s hand, and turn it over into the light for a closer look.  
  
“Try punching things softer than your fist. Like people’s faces,” he advised.  
  
A huff of laughter, close enough to tickle Sulu’s hair. “Can’t punch the people I want to punch,” Kirk said. “Sometimes I think life would be so much easier if I was Batman. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about the court system and stupid shit like this.”  
  
“Black’s not your color,” Sulu murmured. The hand looked fine, though Kirk might have a very unladylike scar on his middle knuckle. Though the inspection was done, he couldn’t bring himself to stop touching Kirk. Kirk had long fingers, knobby and calloused just enough to give them character, and his skin was warm. 

“And I’m pretty sure,” Sulu added, “He does worry but the writers just sort of…handwave the whole process. I think it counts as citizen’s arrest, anyway, but I don’t know how well the evidentary process would hold up in court. There’s this blog written by a lawyer that I follow who analyzes these things, and anyway I think the government might have made a special dispensation just for superheroes in the DC comics univer –” He was babbling. Babbling, and Kirk was looking at him as if he’d lost his mind.

He looked down at where their hands were entertwined. “You should have told me,” he said quietly, and there was a world of reproach in it. He didn’t know why he wasn’t angry, couldn’t articulate that hollow feeling in his stomach. Kirk hadn’t trusted him. He couldn’t think of any way to say it aloud without sounding like a petulant child: _Why did you lie to me? Why didn’t you tell me? Don’t you trust me? What is it about this case? Why do you obviously_ _still love this girl from your past life and let it affect you now,_ _and it tears me up inside, and I don’t know why?_  

“Why are you even here, Hikaru?” The question was soft, so low Sulu almost didn’t hear. 

Sulu turned the hand over. Kirk was paler than he was for all that he spent most of the day outdoors. The back of his hand was reddened and freckled with sunburn against Sulu’s own tanned skin. “You’re my partner,” he said simply. 

“No. I meant, why are you _here_? Why are you a cop, Roo?” 

The question was so unexpected that Sulu went blank for a moment, fumbling for the rote answer he usually gave to that all-too-common question. 

“I wanted to – I guess I wanted to help people. Serve and protect the innocent, all that.” It sounded stupid and insincere even to his own ears, for all that it was true. 

Kirk spoke again, this time with heavy patience. “I’m not talking about the BS you wrote on your academy app, Roo. Why this job, where people hate you most of the time and the system tries to kneecap you every step of the way?”  
  
Sulu laughed weakly. “I wanted to drive things with sirens?” This earned him a look of deep disappointment and – yeah. Okay. Bad time for joking because Kirk was being serious. Right.  
  
He clenched his free hand against his thigh. Kirk was staring at him again with that desolate earnestness that’d prompted their night-out. Sulu was finding he couldn’t ever say no when Kirk looked like that, as if a single negative would irretrievably damage something inside of him. 

It was ironic. He’d made up some sob story about a fictional relative on the academy app; after all, he’d figured, no one would believe that he’d want to be a cop for the same reason Superman – his favorite superhero – had created the Justice League and routinely saved the world. 

“You don’t believe me. Nobody does. But I’m being serious, I just wanted to – I don’t know. Make a difference. Do things no one else can do. I want to help people live their lives in safety, stop bad people doing bad things.” He wanted to add _I know it sounds corny and stupid_ , but in the end, he didn’t. Because it was neither of those things. 

He glanced sideways. Kirk was watching him, intent, still, eyes gleaming in the dim light from the window.  
  
“I wasn’t kidding the other week about wanting to be a firefighter.” He smiled, though it felt stiff and false on his face, because this truth was so fucking stupid and embarrassing, and he’d never told anyone this before. His voice squeaked. “But I’m afraid of fire.”

“Okay, you–” Kirk said, in a tone of surprise, “ _Fire?”_ and he started laughing with the uncontrolled glee of one who had been surprised into it. 

After a while, Sulu joined him, giddy with the confession and embarrassment. “Yeah actually,” he gasped in between chuckles that weren’t really born of mirth, “being burned alive is one of my worst fears.” 

This throttled Kirk’s laughter to silence as efficiently as though he’d been slapped. “Damn, dude,” he said. “That’s heavy.” They sat next to each other on the cot, gazing out through the filmed window, shoulders companionably touching. Kirk squeezed his hand. It was warm, comforting, and not at all weird.   

“I’ve never told anyone that before,” said Sulu, softly. 

“My worst fear is failure.” The flat statement was like deep winter, bleak and harsh and gray.  Sulu turned to stare at him, Kirk’s patrician profile shadowed in the feeble moonlight in shades of black and gray. “That I’m not good enough. That I failed Tamura, and now I can’t even manage to find whoever hurt—“ 

Sulu bumped him with his shoulder. “Shut up, why do you have to make everything about _you_? Even stuff that has nothing to do with you. It’s a psychiatric disorder. You should look it up.” He thought for a moment and continued in more serious tones, “Tamura was her own person. She made her own decisions and lived her own life. So quit trying to take the blame for everything. Including being made my partner.” To make Kirk smile, he added, “’Sides, you’re making me and my worst fear look bad.” He nudged him again. 

Kirk turned an opaque stare on him. “You don’t know?” 

“Know what?” 

Kirk studied him for a very long time, but said nothing. In the silence and Kirk’s intense regard, Sulu realized that they were very near. Inches apart, and doing what all the romance novels would call ‘exchanging a long, soulful look.’ 

The doorknob rattled. 

They broke apart just as the door burst open, Sulu nearly falling off the cot in his haste. “Are you guys in here – oh.” Chekov started to back out. “Sorry, didn’t know you guys were, uh, doing whatever, I’ll leave you to—“  
  
“We were just finishing up,” Kirk said, with more calm than Sulu, who was pretty sure his furiously blushing face was broadcasting _I was SO not making out or something with my partner!!!_ in bold, capslocked, bright red letters burned across his forehead. “What’s up?”  
  
“We heard the news.” Chekov looked all sympathy, but his eyes flicked constantly between Sulu and Kirk. “That sucks, man.” 

“Uh huh. Yeah, thanks,” replied Kirk unenthusiastically. 

Sulu squinted at Chekov.  “Need something?” 

Chekov fidgeted. “Well—ah. Since the day is over, and yours was especially bad, I have an idea! The perfect solution! You’ll like it.”  
  
“Does it involve vodka?” Sulu asked warily. “It does, doesn’t it.”

“No?” Chekov was so bad at lying. 

“I’m going to go ahead,” Kirk interrupted, “and make an executive decision here and say yes, yes it does.” 

“But it’s Wednesday,” Sulu protested. 

“It’s Friday somewhere,” said Chekov with all the assurance of someone who made total sense in their own head. 

Sometimes, Sulu was also discovering, you also go along with bad ideas because you’re simply outvoted.

ooo

 

It did involve vodka. And tequila, and overpriced drinks that were blue or pink and involved cunningly cut pieces of fruit speared on miniature umbrellas, and Jaeger, which was on sale for a dollar a shot because only lushes, college students, and people with very good reason went on Jaeger benders on a Wednesday night.  
  
They were…somewhere. The club was a strange mix of divey and trendy, with far too much deliberate grunge and fake fog and seizure-inducing strobe lights. At least the drinks were cheap and there was no cover. Chekov had picked it. Trust him to sniff out the cheapest booze-hole in the city with hipster pretensions.  
  
Obviously not a club man, McCoy held a drink of something brown on the rocks and nodded along to the beat against a wall. He looked like he was valiantly wishing he were anywhere else, scowling hard enough to clear a two foot radius around him in the crowded room. 

Sulu would have preferred a dim, smoky bar himself, with quiet jazz music and private booths, but at this point Chekov had somehow guilted him into drinking every disgusting concoction he brought for him, and as a result Sulu was in that happy state of no return where everything seemed like a good idea because he’d forgotten why it was a bad idea in the first place. He couldn’t remember why he ever hated drinking before, because he felt _awesome._ His awesome feet weren’t even touching the awesome floor, and the licorice-tasting Jaeger ceased tasting like licorice – or anything at all, for that matter – after three awesome shots, and was thus awesome.  
  
Things went a little fractured then, only to be remembered piecemeal the next day. Bad techno music, strobing lights, too many people, Chekov popping out of the gloom like a marionette and putting drinks into their hands in regular intervals. That was okay, better than thinking about their being damn near suspended, better than thinking about the weird tension between Jim and himself in the Room of Requirement and the strange disappointment that’d hollowed out his gut when Chekov had burst in on them like the Kool-Aid Man. 

It was hard to tell if the place was having an effect on Kirk; he was wearing a hard, wolfish grin that showed too many teeth and didn’t reach his eyes. 

At least, until his fourth drink of whatever fruity and disgusting concoction Chekov could press into his hand, then McCoy took over and dragged Kirk off to buy him whisky. Sulu watched them at the bar, heads together, talking, and in the swirling blur of music and voices and laughter Kirk was like a bright beacon in the dark. Sulu continued to stare at him soddenly until Chekov threw an elbow into his ribs. 

When they came back, Kirk looked almost relaxed. 

Sulu didn’t trust it. Kirk was still drinking too much, too fast – but then, so was everyone. Somewhere in the neighborhood of the seventh drink, Sulu’s thought processes had boarded a train to Vacation-ville and on impulse he grabbed Kirk’s hand and pulled him into the postage stamp sized square in the middle of the room that was masquerading as a dance floor.  
  
Kirk had ripped Sulu’s tie off at some point and now it was draped around his own neck. They were dancing in a little group, squeezed together in the throng of people, then Chekov went bouncing off for another drink or to maybe check that McCoy hadn’t bailed on them without saying goodbye, so they were pretty much left dancing together _,_ Kirk’s lithe body pressed up against Sulu’s, and somewhere in the sodden wastes of Sulu’s brain he registered Kirk’s thigh snugged into interesting places and he couldn’t find it in himself to protest. 

In fact, he was so very much on the side of _not_ protesting that by the time the Pussycat Dolls gave way to Rihanna he found himself grinding against Kirk in a way that was more filth than dancing, and he was very impressed with himself. He hadn’t even known he could booty-bump in that direction. 

Fortunately, his higher functions had been drowned in alcohol, so though somewhere he knew he should freak, his freak-out mode power lines were down for the duration, snowed under the happy static of alcohol and Kirk’s hand on his hip.   

Kirk, pliant against him but nowhere near graceful – but then neither was he – slid his cheek, slick with sweat, against his. His hands came up Sulu's back, and then they were chest to chest, cheek to cheek. Their uneven jolting against each other wasn’t so bad, really. 

Comfortable, even.  
  
In another splinter of time, Kirk put his mouth against Sulu’s ear to be heard over the thump of the bass. The tickle of his breath and the rasp of his cheek against Sulu’s made Sulu laugh and hunch his shoulder. “I need to tell you something.”  
  
“Huh?”  
  
“I need to tell you something!”  
  
“What?”  
  
“I need to –“  
  
Sulu shouted back, “I heard you the first time! What is it?”  
  
“You should know, Uhura didn’t – she – I asked her to make me your partner.”  
  
Sulu pulled back to stare at him. “What?”  
  
“I—“  
  
“No, I mean, why?”  
  
Kirk offered him a smile that was barely visible in the dark of the club. “Because I wanted to.”

“I’m not your keeper, I’ll have you know,” he said. This made total sense _somewhere_ in his alcohol-soaked mind. Thankfully, Kirk hadn’t heard.  
  
Kirk leaned in again. “You already are.”  
  
Aw, that was sweet in a weird, illogical, worst-pick-up-line-ever sort of way, Sulu thought. And then: “God, that was the cheesiest line ever,” he said aloud. “Does that work for you?” 

Kirk said softly, “God, I hope so,” and leaned in. That line was even _worse_ , Sulu thought, but Kirk’s lips were soft, wet and redolent with whisky, and the room swooped for a moment before Kirk locked an arm around Sulu’s neck and held him steady. Sulu leaned into him without thought, his hands on the nubbly pull-over Kirk was wearing, feeling the warmth of him through the fabric, the bumps of his ribs. His world narrowed to their point of contact, and suddenly it was very important that he lick Kirk’s tonsils, taste every inch of his mouth. Kirk moaned, this faint, half crazy sound that Sulu felt rather than heard, and he felt an illogical, sodden triumph at that, as if he'd won something. 

ooo 

 

That wasn’t his ceiling, was his first thought. It was popcorn, for one thing, and an off-white. 

And the mattress was too soft. His back had an ache in it from bending in the wrong places all night long and then he realized he had something lumpy and furry deforming his lumbar region. He flailed around until he unearthed it – a battered purple teddy bear, nearly bald from age and long handling. 

He stared at it, bemused, but then the world whirled around and what felt like a bubble rose up through his esophagus. He flopped out of bed – whose bed _was_ this? – and scrambled for the bathroom, except the bathroom wasn’t where it was supposed to be. 

A trashcan magically appeared in front of his face.  He spent the next couple of minutes annointing it with yellow bile because there was nothing left to sick up, despite his stomach adamantly insisting that maybe he could puke the entire contents of his abdominal cavity out if he really tried. 

“Come on,” Kirk said in his ear, and somehow he managed to push and pull Sulu over to a sitting position and got him to drink some water. It tasted like chlorine and minerals. It tasted like heaven. 

He woke up again later. Kirk was a limp, snoring mass warm up against his back, and now his freak-out mode was back up and running and oh god it was _Kirk_ spooning him, and he nearly hyperventilated until it gradually dawned on him that their clothes were still on and Kirk had given Sulu all of the blankets. 

Heart galloping in his chest, Sulu squinted at the clock – three. Three in the morning. As quietly as he could, considering the room was pitch black and he kept bumping into things as he fumbled in the dark, he gathered his things. Looking back at the bed, Kirk had sprawled into the spot Sulu had just vacated and was now flat on his stomach, a dim snore buzzing on the inhale, looking ten years younger and infinitely more vulnerable. Sulu slipped out the front door, holding his breath as the latch clicked quietly behind him. 

It wasn’t a walk of shame if you were tip-toeing.

ooo

 

After tossing and turning for two hours, staring pop-eyed at the red numbers glowing on his nightstand clock, he got up. Times like this, in the wee hours of the morning where his thoughts lay like boulders in his head, heavy and insurmountable, he wished he could just pass out and sleep the hangover off. His fraternity brothers had been able to sleep after a long night of carousing pretty much anywhere and anytime, and wake up a day later totally fine, but Sulu had never been one of those fortunate creatures. He instead carried on as he was now: queasy and awake, his mouth tasting of moldy socks, nose still full of sour tequila, head feeling like hundreds of little dwarves were hammering on anvils inside. 

Lucky him. At least he wasn’t surrounded by a minefield of snorting, farting bodies that smelled of beer and poor choices. Not being in college anymore had some benefits, at least. 

Poor choices. His traitor stomach turned over at the thought.

Stupid Chekov. God knew how he talked Sulu into this _every single time_ , because the end result was always the same. And fuck, Sulu was on-shift in three hours, and he hadn’t been able to sleep at all. Today was going to be a whole bundle of fun, like being punched in the head by a weightlifter every five seconds. Plus, he’d woken up in Kirk’s _bed_. 

Today was going to be awkward.

He drank tea instead and watched late-night infomercials. By the time he started wondering about his buns of steel and if stripper pole-dancing videos would help them any, dawn had begun breaking red and pink across the sky, and he was feeling vaguely more human.  
  
He changed and went for a run. 

Well, okay. His head wasn’t going to allow for an all-out run, but he managed a half-decent zombie shamble that he allowed himself to call ‘jogging’.  
  
He pushed himself up to a lope, feeling the slap-slap of his feet against asphalt along the marina, and between the burn of his lungs starving for oxygen and the ache in his leg muscles and the pounding of his head, he didn’t – couldn’t – allow himself to think of yesterday’s revelations, or of the dead girl in the trunk, staring at him with a blood-filmed eye. And of the way Kirk had looked that night and every day after, somehow weary and older than his twenty-something years, as if he’d shouldered a burden to heavy to carry. 

Cops weren’t supposed to bring their work home. That was an axiom as old as the hills, but _supposed_ _to_ had very little to do with how it _was_ , and while Sulu had long since mastered the detachment that let him do his job without cracking up, sometimes one slipped through the barriers. But not thinking of it was impossible, because every waking moment for the last three weeks had been spent on just that – the girl and Kirk. Kirk and the girl. And now he knew why.

It had been Kirk. That shattered look on his face. Over a girl, an ex-girlfriend _,_ that Sulu suspected Kirk had been more than just a ‘little bit’ in love with.  
  
His first love?  
  
Didn’t be an idiot, he told himself, and drove himself on harder, using the cold air buffeting his face to pound the thoughts out of his head. So Tamura had been Kirk’s ex. So the case had been so much more personal than Kirk had let on to Sulu, information that he hadn’t trusted Sulu with. So there were a thousand questions that Sulu couldn’t bring himself to ask because he wasn’t sure Kirk would tell him the truth.

He’d had his own hard luck case once. He wondered abruptly just when that impulse to save and redeem had drowned under the sheer futility of policework. But okay, he could understand Kirk wanting justice for an old flame; Sulu also wanted justice and closure for this poor victim just like he did for all his cases, but – but – why was Kirk’s reaction so raw? 

When had Tamura become such a monolith in his mind? Not just _a_ girl, not just a murder victim, with her own hopes and dreams, but an idea, that held so much power over his partner. 

He faltered, and slowed down, feeling the blood return to his wind-chilled face. Not just personal, not just raw. He groped for the right word. It was. It was _unreasonable_. 

Like this thing with Mihara. Kirk could be impulsive, sure. High spirited, yes. Not afraid to bend the rules if it suited his purpose, definitely. But he’d never seen Kirk lose control before, assuming that blowing up at Dinshaw had been a deliberate act. 

Sulu abruptly stopped and leaned against the railing that lined the marina. "What is going on here?" he wondered aloud.

Only the cries of the seagulls answered him.

Kirk was waiting for him when he got back, sitting on the steps that led up into the condo, looking not at all as if he’d just spent a long night in a club so sodden with alcohol he hadn’t known if he was on land or at sea, and then the last couple hours keeping Sulu from soul-bonding with a toilet. He was fiddling on his phone and didn’t notice Sulu's approach until Sulu rounded the cornerpost and nearly stepped on him.  
  
"You didn’t answer your phone," Kirk said by way of hello. "Did you have a nice run?"  
  
"What are you doing here?" Sulu asked stupidly, suddenly aware of how sweaty and gross he was, wet patches staining his running shirt in triangles at the neck and armpits. He wasn’t blushing, dammit. He absolutely wasn’t _,_ because there was no reason to. Expecially not Kirk and his soft lips that Sulu remembered too well. 

Kirk shrugged. He’d changed clothes. He looked somehow smaller now, in rumpled jeans and an ugly gray sweater that looked like it could've been knitted by a particularly untalented grandmother, his shoulders hunched against the chill fog rolling in off the bay. "Thought we could carpool."  
  
That wasn’t anywhere near the top of Sulu’s hastily complied mental list of why the heck his partner was having a conversation with him on his own stoop at six in the morning. "Wait, how do you know where I live?"  
  
"Sulu, I'm a detective." The white grin, so very American apple pie, spread across Kirk's face. “And I’m _Jim Kirk_.”  
  
"Okay, that’s creepy," Sulu mumbled, mostly to himself. He shifted from foot to foot, awkwardness stretching out between them like taffy, and waited for Kirk to tell him the real reason he was here because – carpooling? 

But Kirk only looked cold, watching his breath fog in front of his face with zen-like concentration, and appeared to be waiting for Sulu to do...something. To say something. Maybe ‘fuck yeah, carpooling, let’s save the environment!’ or 'Gee, that was fun last night, wasn’t it? Let’s do it again!' 

Finally Sulu cleared his throat. "Do you...uh. Want to come in?"  
  
Sulu left Kirk sitting in the living room as he showered and changed, all the while pondering the Mystery of Jim. 

He came out to find that Kirk had somehow thoroughly pissed off Spock, who was perched on top of the bookcase, hissing at the intruder as Kirk peered at the family photos on Sulu's mantel. 

Kirk had the one of Sulu's parents in hand, of them standing stiffly together in the permed hair and big tinted glasses and garish shoulder-padded sweaters of the 80’s, and Sulu was sitting just as stiffly between them, his tufty cow-licked hair making his face seem small and pinched and all forehead by comparison. Kirk was grinning at the nine-year-old Sulu.  
  
“Nice hair–” he observed at the photo, then caught himself at Sulu’s expression, coughing and correcting himself:“ –tracksuit, I mean. Very…debonair.” He hastily put that down and picked up another photo, this one of a somewhat older Sulu posed with a young woman in graduation cap and gown and a teenager who resembled her, all three smiling broadly at the camera. Kirana was giving Sulu bunny ears, Akiko was flashing the victory sign with both hands. “Hello, who’re they?”  
  
“My sisters. Kirana’s the older one and Akiko –“ He caught Kirk eying them speculatively and he leaned over and punched Kirk hard in the bicep. “Hey. No, no you most definitely can’t.”  
  
“Calm down, mama bear, I wasn’t thinking anything like that,” Kirk said easily. His eyes flicked from their faces to Sulu’s, as if trying to trace familial resemblance. “I always figured you’d have a lot of sisters. And be the middle child. You’re the type.”  
  
“What're you talking about?”  
  
“You know. Responsible. Wanting to take care of everybody. A little spoiled maybe, but respectful, too. Like you spent most of your childhood being bossed around by sisters. And you hate someone else getting all the attention.”  
  
"Jim," Sulu sighed. “Why are you here?”  
  
“I told you–”  
  
"Dude. You live in San Francisco." Sulu tracked across the living room, picking up magazines and dirty dishes as he went. He wasn’t a messy guy by any stretch of the imagination, but he lived alone without many visitors and he hadn’t been expecting anyone. 

Fortunately, Kirk showed no sign of having noticed the bachelor pad mess and only replied, "Uh, yeah?"

Spock paced by haughtily, tail held aloft. Arching his body into almost a complete bow in avoidance as Kirk bent to stroke him, he awarded Kirk another contemptuous glare and made for the bedroom. _Good kitty_ , Sulu said to himself, smiling a little.

"So this is Alameda. Across the bay."  
  
"So?"  
  
"So how’s this carpooling thing supposed to work if you live in the city?"  
  
"Wait, how do _you_ know where I live?"  
  
Obviously Kirk thought he’d been too drunk to remember that taxi ride back to Kirk's apartment. They’d dropped off Chekov first, and McCoy had pre-paid the rest of the way, but they’d nearly got kicked out of the cab anyway when Sulu’s ability to not puke in the backseat had come into question. Kirk talked fast and promised double the fare, then they’d listed up Kirk’s stairway as Sulu leaned crazily one way or that and had generally alternated between being either maudlin or completely useless. 

Sulu had definitely made Kirk earn his keep last night, he remembered that quite clearly. 

Forced to be the responsible, semi-sober one herding the drunken friend(s) who were acting like a herd of temperamental, yowling cats who all insisted on going in opposite directions – oh yes, Sulu remembered that part from undergrad _very_ well. It wasn’t often that he was on the other side of the coin. 

And there’d been no more kissing. At least, beyond the one marathon session inside the club that’d gone on for what had felt like hours _,_ and then the other one when he’d gone outside into the smoking area for some air – ironic, that – and Kirk had been out there again, cadging a cigarette from a pretty blonde with all the skill of long practice, and Sulu couldn’t _not_ kiss him in the illogical jealousy that had flared behind his eyes. He’d snatched the cigarette out of Kirk’s mouth and pushed him up against the brick wall under the yellow light, too drunk to care about the blonde’s titter or the watching crowd, and had chased the taste of smoke and cheap alcohol until Kirk’s hands had twined in his hair and clenched there. 

His cheeks heated at the memory.  
  
So Sulu waved away the question, feeling too much like his brains had been squeezed out through his eye sockets from the sleepless night to go into that little saga in full, unsure if he even wanted to – or even what he’d say. 

He went into the kitchen instead and pulled out cereal and soymilk and went hunting for a clean bowl. He’d have to do dishes soon. His five day supply from Ikea was just about out. "Want breakfast?" he asked, poised with two bowls in hand. His voice was steady.  
  
Kirk seated himself on a stool in the breakfast nook and picked up the cereal box. "Flax? Organic? Extra fiber?" he asked, making a face. "What is this madness?"  
  
Sulu frowned at him. "Really?"  
  
"No, not really. Come on, put that horse feed back and let's go get Krispy Kreme."  
  
"Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Len ban you from bringing in any more donuts?"  
  
"The man’s a Philistine,“ Kirk said complacently. “He'll come around with the right donut." His shoes were already back on and he was fiddling impatiently with the doorknob. "Come on, they have this new maple-nut creme that I've been dying to try."  
  
It was almost normal for them, this joking back-and-forth filled with idiotic nothings. But it wasn’t the usual dance today, and they both knew it. 

Sulu grabbed Kirk's elbow just as he was about to exit. "Kirk, why did you come all the way out here?" He’d thought about it all through his very unrelaxing hot shower and the weird dance in the living room and had come up with zilch. He needed to know what Kirk wanted from him, needed Kirk to say what was so important at six in the morning to navigate out of the maze of the city into one of the more inaccessible towns in the East Bay. 

It couldn’t be about last night, it couldn’t be. That—had just been the high emotions of the day, and then too much alcohol. But he found himself wishing, secretly in a place that he didn’t examine too deeply, that that was exactly what this was.  
  
“Nothing,” Kirk said, a little too quickly. He shifted uneasily from foot to foot, his eyes unable to meet Sulu’s. "Actually. I just.” That normalcy slipped like a badly painted mask. And just like that, it was the same haunted pain that speared Sulu right between the ribs that first night and had made him first begin to see Kirk as…not just another arrogant prettyboy. “I just wanted to see you. Just to talk. Can we get out of here? Get some coffee, maybe?”  
  
Sulu hesitated, fighting a blush, debating asking _Talk about what at six-thirty in the morning?_ but it had obviously cost Kirk something to ask even that much. Kirk hadn’t asked for his help that night, but hadn’t rejected it. Now he was on Sulu’s doorstep, the same look in his eyes, and still not asking. Not verbally, anyway.  
  
“Fine. You’re driving,” Sulu said finally. He should’ve regretted it instantly as Kirk lit up as bright as Fourth of July fireworks, but he was finding that he vastly preferred a genuinely smiling Kirk over a sad or angry one, and heck, maybe a few blood-pressure raising near-crashes first thing in the morning would work just as well as a couple of espressos.

ooo

 

Kirk had obviously spent his meager detective’s salary on his motorcycle instead of his car, because his Datsun was a piece of shit that smelled vaguely of old socks and tupperware containers of moldering lunches. “I think we should take my car instead,” Sulu suggested after one dismayed look and sniff.  
  
“Nuh uh. And give up the one time you let me drive without making me fight you for it? Hell no.” Kirk brightened as an idea struck him. “Unless–”  
  
“No way, you’re not driving my car. The only person who gets to crash it is _me_.”  
  
“I wouldn’t crash your sexy blue WRX. Not even a scratch.” Kirk turned in the general direction of what he evidently thought was Sulu’s garage and yelled, “See, baby? I love you more!”  
  
“Will you shut up, people are _sleeping_ ,” Sulu hissed, but he was laughing. “How do you know what I drive?”  
  
“Hard to miss it when you pull up in a ridiculous souped-up sports car every morning. You’re too old to be driving those, by the way,” Kirk informed him judiciously.  
  
“Stalker.”  
  
In the ensuing thirty minutes, Sulu accidentally put his foot into an old Burger King bag in the front seatwell that was full of what he hoped was mummified fries and nearly bailed on the venture entirely. But just before Sulu could throw himself bodily out of the moving car, Kirk found a Krispy Kreme store with an unerring instinct of X-Men mutant levels. 

This was followed by a deep discussion, as they stared at a bewildering selection of fried circular dough, on how many donuts Detective McCoy would allow before he tried to murder Kirk.  
  
”He’s got a nightstick crammed up his ass all the way to his neck, and I want to teach him how to relax," Kirk protested. “Sometimes I wish he’d go back to smoking those nasty cigars. He was a lot easier to live with back then.”  
  
“I wonder if the ME will write ‘asphyxiation with food forcibly lodged in victim’s throat’ or ‘death by donut’ on your autopsy report,” Sulu wondered aloud. He had a much more wholesome breakfast bagel with low-fat blueberry cream cheese from the café next door in hand, along with a cup of passable coffee.  
  
“Multigrain and bran? In one item?” Kirk didn’t have to sound quite so scandalized, in Sulu’s opinion. “In a _bagel_?”

“Do you realize how cliché it is for a cop to like donuts?”

That cheerfulness wasn’t exactly a façade anymore, Sulu concluded as Kirk continued in offended tones as if Sulu had just kicked a puppy, “Hippie.” They went out the door into the early sunlight. The street was just beginning to bustle with traffic and other insane morning people like Kirk, who were exercising, chatting, and otherwise bursting with such _carpe diem_ enthusiasm that Sulu was exhausted just watching them.

“And you’re an idiot,” he said. “Is it really so bad to have nutrition in your diet?” The car door wouldn’t give, probably stuck fast with a century’s worth of grime, spilled soda, and guano. It protested with dismal creaks and groans as he yanked on the handle. “I mean, not that I don’t enjoy clogging my arteries before seven, but—“ 

Later, Sulu could not have said that he’d seen it coming – for all that it was his job to be observant, he had no time to process Kirk homing in on his face out of the glare of the easterly sun like a guided cruise missile. His mind on the Peet’s down the street, Kirk’s car pulling a Christine, then suddenly his world was filled with something soft and warm covering his mouth, the taste of oversweetened coffee, the burn of stubble. Then it burst on him that it was _Kirk._ Kirk was kissing him, and this time, they were both totally sober.

He jerked away. Stared at him, then looked down at his shoes, belatedly discovering that Kirk had made him spill his coffee. Kirk’s bravado was gone now, in its place a nervous vulnerability that was jarring and foreign on his face. 

This was totally out of his scope of experience. Not that he’d had much, but there’d never been an… _ambush_. And it was _Kirk._ His partner, and he was pretty sure there were strict rules about fraternizing with your partner. He was….he was shocked. Stupefied. Blue screen of death. It was – it was too early for this. 

He said, “Uh, okay. I just—“ he didn’t know where to look, and he especially had no idea what to do with the urge to run his tongue along the lines of Kirk’s reddened lips and test the texture of his stubble, to taste the crumbs of sugar at the corners of his mouth. 

“I – I need more coffee,” he said instead, stiffly. Confused, fighting an internal battle, he turned and walked jerkily down the street, ignoring the frozen silence that was Kirk. 

ooo

 

As they were crossing the Bay Bridge back into the city – Kirk fishing handfuls of quarters and pennies out of his glove compartment to pay the $5 toll and earning himself a glare from the toll-taker – Kirk broke the silence that had previously been only filled with the sounds of NPR. “We should talk.”  
  
Sulu sipped his coffee and stared out the window at the side of the bridge, which was too high to actually see anything interesting in the bay. He waited. Kirk sounded so remote now.  
  
Kirk reached over and snapped the radio off. The car swerved a little in the lane. “Are you listening?”  
  
“Yeah. Talk.”  
  
Kirk seemed taken aback at Sulu’s neutral response. He drove for a minute longer in silence, then asked, “Sulu, do you like me?”  
  
“What? What kind of question is that?”  
  
A corner of his mouth twisted into a parody of a smile. “It’s a simple question.” 

“Kirk – if this is about you and me—“ 

“Not that,” Kirk interrupted. “Never mind that. It was a mistake, okay? I just thought – never mind. It was my bad judgment. It never happened, won’t happen again.” 

“Okay,” Sulu said simply, ignoring the pang in his chest. He looked out the window so Kirk wouldn’t see the expression on his face. 

“I. I kind of need to know what side you’re on. About this case, I mean. Because it’s that kind of a thing.”  
  
Sulu closed his eyes. This was all so junior high and yet, at the same time, so hopelessly complicated. “What do you mean, ‘what side you’re on’? Is life really that simple for you? It’s a yes or no question?”  
  
Kirk cast one look at him, his eyes an empty vista of weariness and regret and grief and something else that chilled Sulu to the bone. There was no predicting what a man who looked like that would do.  
  
“Fuck,” Sulu breathed, suddenly afraid. “What is it?”  
  
“It really is that simple, Roo. Do you like me?”  
  
Long silence, the quiet only emphasized by the jarring thrum of the tires on the grooves of the road, the rattles and squeaks of the car. He leaned his forehead against the window and watched the bridge fence blur by. “Yes, okay? Fuck. _Fuck_. I don’t swear, did you notice that? And you’re making me do it.”  
  
“I’m talented like that,” Kirk replied, but he wasn’t smiling.  
  
“Kirk. _Jim_. I have news for you. We’re off the case. Almost _suspended_. For – for a girl you haven’t seen or talked to her in, what, years?“ 

Thrum. Rattle. The vents belched out lukewarm air that smelled like wet dog. Finally, Kirk said, “Yes.” 

Sulu was sounding more and more like an asshole with every word. He raked his fingers through his hair in frustration. He should shake some sense into Kirk, should follow Uhura’s diction to keep Kirk out of trouble. He should, except – “Look. What are you thinking, here?” 

It wasn’t a no. Kirk caught it, betrayed it with a twitch of his lips, maybe in approval. “Maybe nothing. Probably nothing, depending on how the investigation goes.”

“The investigation that Pavel and Len will lead, right?” 

“…Right.” 

 “And if it doesn’t go well? If it goes the way of say, a suspect’s house blowing up and it turns out he’s got an alibi and you nearly got his grandfather blown up too as a bonus?” 

A muscle in Kirk’s jaw twitched. “I thought that you wanted to help people. To make the world a better place, a safer place. Were you just talking out of your ass?” 

“Pull over.” 

Kirk turned startled eyes on him. “We’re in the middle of the Bay Bridge, Hikaru.” 

“ _Pull the fuck over!”_

The car slewed to into the break-down lane and slammed to a stop, the other cars going by so fast that the car rocked on its wheels in their wake. Sulu wrenched the door open and stormed around the back to the driver’s side. “Get out.” 

Kirk didn’t for a long moment. The way he squinted up at Sulu against the morning sun as if Sulu was too painful to stare at for too long was so very like that first morning not so long ago, but the pang of regret was drowned in a tsunami of rage. 

Then Kirk levered himself out of the car, squinting against the wind that blew grit into their faces, the doppler voices of people shouting at them as they passed, and stood upright. 

Sulu hit him. It was a shit punch; no one punched decently when they were nearly incoherent with rage and honestly, he didn’t go around _practicing_ it, no matter what the public thought of the police. It missed Kirk’s cheekbone entirely and landed full between the eyes with a hollow _thock_. 

Kirk saw it coming, but he didn’t flinch, didn’t interrupt, just closed his eyes and swayed from the impact as Sulu raved, “You only had a hunch, right? You thought you knew the answer, right? Even if you didn’t have any evidence? 

“Jim, you listen to me. Listen up, listen very carefully. It is not going to do her or her family any good if you go off the reservation _again_ and get fired or whatever— are you really – look at me, damn you – are you _really_ prepared for the consequences? You _really_ want to get fired or arrested, or get _me_ fired–“  
  
“Lay off!” Kirk roared. 

He seemed to surprise himself – shit, Sulu too – with his outburst. The next sentence came out barely above a whisper and Sulu had to strain to hear him. “I know you think I’m all sorts of weird and crazy, okay? I know you don’t _really_ like me, that you’re pretty much just stuck with me because Uhura said so, but at least pay me the respect of thinking I know what I’m doing, okay?”  
  
There’d been entirely too many strained silences that morning already. Now they added another. “Well,” Sulu said at last, his anger suddenly drained out of him, left with only an enervating depression. “I don’t think you’re crazy. Or at least, _that_ crazy.”  
  
Kirk just snorted, a bitter, cynical sound.  
  
Then: “Sorry. I’m sorry I almost got us both suspended, all right?”

Sulu just looked at him. “No, you’re not.” 

“I was just so sure that –“ he gestured helplessly. “You know what? You’re right, I’m not. I’m not sorry about that. I did what I thought we had to do. I _am_ sorry for being the way I am, that – that makes you look at me that way, like I’m too stupid to tie my own shoelaces. I just. Shit.” 

“Well, yeah,” Sulu said. His face was burning and he felt hot and guilty and miserable all over, and hating Kirk just a little for making him feel that way. “We all know I’m stuck with you – or you’re stuck with me – because you have bad taste in partners but it’s not like I’m suffering here, okay?” He shuffled his feet among the discarded road debris, nervously. “It’s been…fun. Great, even. For the most part. Except when you’re a _serious_ pain, and sometimes I really wonder if you’re going to get us killed.”  
  
Silence, in which they just looked at each other. It seemed to Sulu that their relationship to this point had been characterized by long, awkward silences, and he thought, once more, that there was no way they were going to work out. 

A siren blurped. “You boys need help?” a magnified voice said from behind them. Sulu nearly jumped a foot. They’d been too intent on the argument, drowned out in the throbbing hum of passing traffic, that he hadn’t even noticed the approach of a CHP patrol car, much less the officer who was watching them coolly with one hand on her utility belt in case someone got frisky and needed macing. “If it’s car trouble, let’s work on getting you moved off the roadway, you’re clogging up traffic.” 

They were; people were slowing down to stare at them. “Yeah,” he lied quickly, because Kirk had lapsed into that broody silence that Sulu had grown to dread. “Yeah, we had a bit of engine trouble, but I think it’ll start now.” 

To Sulu’s dismay she only studied them closer, observing the way Kirk’s forehead was purpling, the way Sulu had his fist cradled in his other hand like he’d punched a stone wall  “Boys, I’d like to see your licenses and registration, please.” 

This morning just kept getting better and better. 


	4. Chapter 4

Now there was this new thing between them. They didn’t talk about it. They didn’t talk about a lot of things, true, but it was fine. It was all fine, and they had a job to do. A job that didn’t involve personal things, but hey. 

Considering that they were stuck in a car together nearly eight hours a day and change, and spent the rest of their ten-hour work days sitting in briefings and community meetings or at a desk filing reports, at all times _together_ , that was quite a feat. Sulu hadn't realized before how skilled Kirk was at not talking about things he didn’t want to, or of just how busy their days were, so it was something that just…didn’t come up. It was easier that way. 

Life went on, as it always did. The bridge victim was designated a cold case – it was a suspicious death, but there was nothing to go on, even with appeals to the media. They only had the one witness to attest that it had been a murder instead of a suicide, but the story kept changing, and would probably never be resolved. 

He hated that. Hated leaving the family hanging, hated letting a case fall into obscurity with so many unanswered questions. But they had many other cases to worry about, including a decapitated head found in Golden Gate Park with no body to be found, and there were too few resources to continue investigating a case that was going nowhere. 

Outwardly Kirk didn’t change much to untrained eyes. The first week they were stiff and uncomfortable around each other, but by the second they had fallen into a sort of routine of work, work, and more work, which was pretty much just back to square one. Kirk seemed to be behaving himself, applying himself diligently to closing the cases they were assigned, and kept his head down. 

Sulu tried not to think about how suspicious Kirk’s compliant demeanor was, because it would’ve been easier to take it at face value. But suspicion was his trade, to question his livelihood, so in spite of himself he watched the way Kirk smiled and laughed as they went about their daily routine. 

Kirk's smile never quite reached his eyes. His laugh was always a little hollow and preoccupied. 

Sulu wished he knew how to fix this.

Kirk texted him Friday and canceled their next scheduled Saturday morning hike along the Orinda coastline, then refused to say why he didn’t want to reschedule for the next day. Kirk had cancelled a hike once before, but he’d accompanied his excuse with a salacious invitation for Sulu to come with him to some debaucherific activity Sulu hadn’t been interested in since his college days and the one break-up that he wasn’t sure he’d ever get over. This time, Kirk didn’t even break their – Sulu couldn’t think of the right word that wasn’t ‘date‘– via phone, but instead by text. It was as if Sulu had been dumped – by _text_ – and Sulu spent half of his Friday evening fuming and then the rest of his weekend off wondering if he'd lost his mind.  
  
He didn’t hear back from him either, and that was another notch in Sulu's mental tally of Things That Are Wrong With Kirk. He didn’t admit, not even to himself, that he even had such a list, or that he'd even ever remotely thought about what was or was not up with his partner, or whether his long radio silence – which was unusual because Kirk usually pinged him on gTalk at various points during their days off as a matter of course, which wasn't nearly as suffocating as one would think, and Kirk hadn’t at all this weekend – was because their relationship, both professional and personal, had been damaged beyond repair. 

Sulu didn’t realize he’d miss Kirk, until he did.

ooo 

 

His parents lived in their retirement in a sprawling ranch-style home in Sausalito.  He looked out at the fog creeping in from the bay, and wondered if a night in the now-musty room his parents always kept for him would be better than wending his way thirty miles back home at this late hour. He wished Chekov had come tonight. It’d been a quiet dinner, just him, Akiko, Mom and Dad, and Chinese take-out. 

“Are you staying tonight?” asked Akiko from behind him.  

“Nah. I have to feed Spock.” 

“Well, good.” She was wrapping herself in an oversized scarf, purse and had a giant duffle-bag of laundry at her feet. “So you can give me a ride back to school, right?” 

“Uh, sure. Where’s your car?” 

“Oh, at school,” she said, breezily. “My friend dropped me off, he’s visiting family in Petaluma for the week.” She turned and ran inside and noisily bade their parents goodbye with smacking kisses, then got into Sulu’s car. 

“God, turn up the heat,” she shivered, and started cranking at the dashboard console without asking. He thought about telling her to quit fiddling with the radio stations, or of maybe scolding her, big-brother style, about the irresponsibility of not arranging a ride back _before_ she’d arrived instead of trusting to providence, but he said nothing, only half-listening to her muttering to herself as they got on the 101. 

“They might be happier to see you if you didn’t bring over laundry every week,” he finally replied to a particularly querulous complaint. 

“Shut up, Mom and Dad’re always happy to see me.” 

“Yeah, _you_. But not your giant sack of dirty underwear.” 

“Whatever, like you and Ki didn’t do the same thing when you were in college. At least I do it myself instead of leaving it out for mom.” 

“That’s because I’m her favorite child,” said Sulu in total seriousness, and ducked away from her backhand. “One day, I will leave you on the highway,” he threatened, but only half-heartedly. His thoughts had turned back to Kirk, as they had the entire weekend. The same retread, the same nagging questions with no answers. His own brain had turned traitor on him, because he couldn’t turn it off. 

Akiko, who’d been studying him from the corner of her eyes under the guise of fiddling with her iPod, asked, “Is everything all right?” In the darkness of the car and the hesitance in her voice he realized that he’d been silent for too long. 

He thought about lying to her, thought for a good minute. When they’d been children, growing up in San Francisco, he’d been closer to Kirana. These days, Kirana was almost never around, except for family holidays and sporadic, unpredictable weekends. Now Akiko was here, sitting in the front seat of his car and looking at him with concern. Suddenly he realized that she wasn’t the gap-toothed grubby tomboy of his mind’s eye, with scrapes on both elbows and knees who’d liked to steal his G.I. Joes and use them to raze Barbie’s playhouse to the ground. 

He blew out his breath. “No. Not really,” he confessed. 

“Is it about Jim?” 

“How—“ he cleared his throat. “How did you know?” 

“Come _on_ , Kangaroo. Because I’ve known you all my life?” 

“Don’t call me tha—“ 

“Also, me and mom and Pavel have all told you to invite him over for dinner, and you hate it when we do that, and now you’ve totally stopped talking about him, _and_ you didn’t tell mom ‘n dad about you two getting into trouble the other week – “ she paused for breath. 

“I guess Pavel told you about that.” Glumly. Chekov and his giant blabber mouth. He’d hoped to keep that particular blemish from his family. His parents had been excessively disappointed when he’d opted for a police career out of college instead of something considerably less hazardous and more lucrative like law school or dentistry. The last thing he needed was to add to their worries, both for their peace of mind and for his own, because both his mom and dad could nag the finish off furniture. 

“Well, no, I was the only one he told,” she said. Then, simply, “He’s worried about you. And Jim. He says that you’ve…gone all weird on each other.” 

That was such an accurate assessment of the situation that it surprised a laugh out of him, a harsh, bitter one. 

“Hikaru, you’re scaring me.” 

They were crossing over the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge now, the tires humming across the asphalt. 

“’Roo?” 

“It’s not what you think, Ako,” he says finally. “Jim, he – we –“ he sighed. “We’re friends. I think. But I don’t know if I want to be, and I don’t know if _he_ wants to be, or what he wants from me, and... And, yeah,“ he finished eloquently. “Am I making any sense here?” 

Akiko was silent. “Are you partners, or are you dating, Roo?” 

If he wasn’t driving, if he didn’t have to be very careful to not derail the car off the road into the bay, he would’ve flailed where he sat because oh god, his sister was way too perceptive. She picked up on his electrified silence and summed it up succinctly, “Oh my god, you _like_ him!” 

Sulu died a little inside. 

“You do, you do. Oh my god, how fucking adorable.” 

“Language, Ako,” Sulu said faintly. 

“So, does he know?” 

“I don’t know how comfortable I am having this conversation with you.” 

“Does he know?” she persisted. All pretense at being more interested in her iPod than the topic at hand had been cast away in favor of staring at Sulu with avid curiosity, her eyes scanning his face. She softened at what she saw there. “You should talk to him.” 

“I think he knows,” Sulu said. “It might’ve been hard to miss.” 

“Wait, did you—“ 

“We were drunk and— _don’t look like that_ , you perv!” He groaned. “You know what, forget about it. Forget I said anything, forget everything you’ve got there in your-” he gestured with one hand at her –“pervo little head, just—augh.” He must’ve suffered a fit of insanity, thinking Akiko was an adult. She looked like one, sure – albeit one that was on the nearer side of twenty than thirty – but she had all the mental maturity of a six year old. How could he have forgotten. 

“Aww, my brother’s growing up,” she laughed. “At least this one’s better than your last one.” 

“Shut up, Nicole was…sweet,” he said. His last girlfriend had been two years ago. Had it been that long already? He’d been too wrapped up in his work and then the scandal with his previous partner to socialize, much less date around much. Then Kirk had come into his life under full steam and in hindsight, it was a little eerie how seamlessly and quickly they had meshed despite themselves, until they no longer had. 

“Yeah, that was the problem,” said Akiko. “She was sweet. Nothing else. In other words, boring. Beige. Taupe. Ikea furniture.” 

He stewed over that. Akiko _would_ find Nicole bland; her taste ran to…the quirky. He hadn’t yet quite gotten over her boyfriend – now ex, thank god – who had collected any and all Clefairy Pokemon plushies, because they were ‘round and pink’. “That comparison doesn’t even work. You’ve never even met him.” 

“I know _of_ him. Pavel likes him. A lot.” 

“So you just sit around and gossip about me?” 

“No. We don’t sit, we chat. Online _._ For hours.” The grin on her face was very like Kirk’s. “About you. Every single detail. Your favorite colors. Whatever boring suit n tie combo you picked for the day.” She singsonged, “Every step you take, every move you make–” 

Sulu pulled the car up to the curb outside the UC Berkeley dorms, relieved beyond words that the drive and this surreal interrogation was over. “Get out,” he said wearily. 

She leaned over and pecked him on the cheek, still grinning wickedly. “I expect good results when I see you next week, Roo Roo.” 

“Out!” 

ooo 

 

"Is that today's crossword?" a voice said at Sulu's shoulder, close enough to feel the puff of breath against his ear. Sulu was concentrating hard on his sudoku – he’d messed up somewhere, none of the numbers were fitting, and it was driving him crazy – and he startled badly enough to elbow his coffee over onto his shirt.  
  
"Oh hey, sorry, Hikaru," Kirk said as Sulu shook his scalded hand in pain, and shuffled some napkins off the top of a box he was carrying into Sulu's lap. "High-strung today, aren’t we?"  
  
"Never mind," Sulu said more sharply than he’d intended, pushing his chair away from him and the one-handed blotting of his chest, Kirk's other hand juggling the white and black cardboard box like a waiter on a heaving ship. Kirk looked totally normal, not at all as if he'd been avoiding Sulu all weekend, not at all as if he’d been crashed into a ditch as Sulu had secretly feared. “You’re late.” 

Kirk’s smile slipped just a little, but before he could respond, Chekov asked, "What do you have there?" leaning over Sulu’s desk, more interested in the contents of the box than the state of Sulu's burns.  
  
"Krispy Kreme," Kirk announced grandly, recovering himself in a second. “Ah-ah,” lifting the box away from Chekov’s questing hand, "I think Mister McCranky-Not-A-Morning-Person gets some sugar first." He held out the box to Sulu, all contrite puppy face. "Dude, I said I was sorry. And I’m not that late. Forgive? Got you some raspberry jelly-filled cuz I know they're your favorite."  
  
It was impossible to stay mad at Kirk, especially in the face of – or in spite of – Kirk's creepy knowledge of Sulu’s weakness for free office food of any kind when he'd missed breakfast, so Sulu crammed the entire thing into his mouth instead of saying something bitchy. Or refusing, because that would also be bitchy. "Fanks," he said after a long moment, feeling the sugar high spread into his bloodstream like delicious, delicious crack.  
  
"Damn, talented," Kirk said over his shoulder as he moved on to other desks. "You're gonna make some man really happy one day."  
  
Sulu choked. Chekov laughed.

"Jerk," Sulu mumbled, when Kirk was far enough away not to hear.  
  
"I don't know," Chekov said, still smiling as he picked apart his own old-fashioned with sprinkles and licked the icing off his fingers. "I think he's kind of fun."  
  
"MORNING BRIEFING, DAMMIT!" McCoy bellowed, sticking his head out of the briefing room.  
  
"Kirk!" McCoy said, and caught Kirk’s arm as he passed him. The concern in his voice caught Sulu's attention instantly. "What the hell happened to your face?"

Now Sulu noticed the bruising along the side of Kirk's face, the side he'd been careful to keep turned away from Sulu, in addition to the bruise that was fading on his forehead. There was evidence he'd tried to cover it up with..something – foundation? where in the world would he have found foundation? or powder, so Sulu didn’t mentally slap himself nearly as hard as he should have for not noticing it first. But why would Kirk try to cover it up?  
  
"Accident," Kirk said glibly, the lie tripping as easily off his tongue as Sulu read the truth in the line of his shoulders, the way he blinked just a tad too quickly. McCoy's frown told them both that he wasn’t fooled either, but he surprised Sulu with, "Hope the other guy looks better than you, but I doubt it," and that was that. 

The briefing commenced, introducing a new shooting at Mission and Third, which promised to be messy and bizarre. Some rookies caught the shit detail this time, and there were muffled groans and general ribbing.  
  
"What the _fuck_ ," Sulu hissed at Kirk thirty minutes later when they were finally released from the purgatory of morning briefing.  
  
"Accident. And, language, 'Roo."  
  
"You're not my mom. And returning to my original question, but excuse me, but _what the fucking fuck_. Don’t tell me that was an accident." He gestured at Kirk's bruise which really, wasn't as well hidden as he’d thought. How the hell had he missed it before? Distracted by donuts? Really? "And where’ve you been? What were you up to this weekend?" He lowered his voice as several cops walked by, very obviously not _not_ listening.  
  
"What do you want to hear?" Kirk was so obviously readying a tall tale, all big blue eyes and waffling charm.  
  
Lies. His partner was lying to him. Sulu tried to ignore how that stung. He stepped back, hands spread in a shrug. Smiled into those eyes, trying not to look betrayed, and stalked off.

ooo 

 

Sulu was not watching Kirk sidle up to Chekov from across the pen. McCoy wasn’t even worth the attempt at cajolery; McCoy had made it plain that Kirk was going to lose fingers and toes if he came near him, and was even now leaned back in his chair a hairsbreath from the tipping point, giving both eyebrows a workout. 

Kirk was asking Chekov something in a way that could only be interpreted as badgering, as Chekov continued to shake his head and inch away as if from a rabid tiger. 

Kirk followed, talking at him even more insistently. Little bits floated over to Sulu, little snippets that he could match up with Kirk's moving mouth so he caught _come on, man_ and _tiny little favor_ and _what's the big deal?_  

Finally Chekov rounded on him, saying something probably like _G_ _e_ _t the fuck out of my face_ except Sulu knew Chekov too well, so probably Chekov had said that minus the 'fuck' and probably with an additional 'please' and in a much less bitchy tone than Sulu credited him with in his head. But it seemed to work; Kirk gave up and stalked past Sulu without even a look and slammed himself out of the room so hard that the pens on Sulu’s desk rattled.  
  
Curiosity, or suicidal tendencies, made him saunter up casually next to Chekov five minutes later, under the guise of picking up a printout from the copy machine.  Chekov gave him a sidelong glance of irritation, a foreign expression on his boyish face. Maybe the detective life partnered with McCoy was having an effect on Chekov's usual ebullience, or Kirk just had that effect on people. "Let me guess, you want something too?"  
  
"What would that be, Pasha?" Casually, as if he hadn't lowered his voice so Kirk or McCoy wouldn't overhear.  
  
The affectionate nickname melted Chekov's irritation only fractionally. "Someone needs to tell these rookies that life's not like the movies. He wants to be in on the investigation! Can you imagine? He gets taken off the case, he doesn’t trust us to do this right, he wants me to lose my job." He muttered something to himself in Russian.  
  
"It doesn’t sound to me like Jim is in it for the glory, though," Sulu said carefully. “And technically, he’s not a rookie.”  
  
"You know him better than me," Chekov said sarcastically.  
  
Sulu threw an elbow into Chekov’s bony ribs. "Shut up, nobody wants your job, you idiot," he said, teasing.  
  
"You're a good detective," Chekov said. "I always told you to take the test when I did, didn’t I? But you wouldn't, you wanted to stay on patrol a little longer. And now look. You're a good detective, but we are not partners." 

McCoy’s chair thumped to the floor, perhaps in indignation.  
  
"Eh," Sulu sighed. To turn the conversation from a well-trod topic that he would as soon not rehash, he said, "How about you do _me_ the favor, okay? We'll stay out of the investigation. Just keep us in the know."

Maybe Chekov understood the amorphous jumble of Kirk, guilt, attraction, and annoyance that was a giant brown muddle in Sulu's head. Or maybe he didn’t. “Why?” came a gruff voice. McCoy had joined them during the conversation, butting in before Chekov could answer. He cut his eyes to the door that Kirk had so loudly exited.  
  
Sulu moved to block his line of sight and offered a placatory smile. “Come on, we just want to know. Maybe we could help you–" catching Chekov's eye, "–er, in any way you'll let us but not interfering – um. Why you gotta bust my balls about this?”  
  
“Because the lieutenant pulled you off the case. Because this looks personal,” Chekov said. “Is it?”  
  
He’d known Chekov too long to lie. “I don’t know, sorta? For him, maybe.” 

“What about for you?”  

Sulu swallowed. “Maybe. A little bit.”  
  
Chekov’s eyes were on the door too, his expression grave. “You know the rules about that. That’s just going to be trouble. Already has been trouble.”  
  
“Especially if Kirk’s involved,” McCoy added. “So, I ask again, why?” Something about the detective always intimidated Sulu, just a bit. McCoy was a good guy, but it was the eyebrows; the effect of them hiking up and down always made Sulu’s knees go watery. He was pretty sure the man liked him just fine, to the extent that McCoy seemed to like anyone, but damn, those eyebrows. Like angry caterpillars, capable of expressing infinite spectrums of _You_ _a_ _re wasting my time, goddamnit_.  
  
“I don’t know,” Sulu replied, helplessly. Maybe it was because the victim reminded him too much of Akiko that he kept returning to the crime scene photos for the sake of his own sanity, maybe it was because Kirk had retreated behind a wall of false cheer so profound it was almost menacing. And maybe Sulu just wanted to know. Crime was normal, murder was normal, and even dead bodies in trunks happened more often than one would think. But this one. He had to see this one through. For Kirk. 

“Hikaru.” 

“I just –“ he gestured helplessly. “Okay, so.” He sighed, and took the plunge. “Jim knew the vic from before, okay? and I want to help him. Because—because –“ he couldn’t finish. “I’m just asking for one favor. A small one. Please.” 

Chekov and McCoy glanced at each other. Sulu added desperately, “Just keep us updated, that’s all I ask. We won’t interfere.” Figuring he’d debased himself enough already, he tacked on an extra wheedle: “Pretty please?” He tried for the puppy eyes.  
  
“Only if you pay me that fifty dollars you owe me,” Chekov said, even as he rolled his eyes at Sulu.  
  
Sulu breathed again. “Awesome. Thanks, Chekov. I owe you bi–”  
  
“And you give me back my copy of Dance of Dragons,” Chekov added.

“What. The fuck.” McCoy said and his glance said patently, _Nerds._

“Why you gotta bust my balls?” Sulu asked again plaintively, but he was smiling. 

ooo 

 

Chekov and McCoy were busy with a million other homicides already – a knifing on 26th reported just that morning – so Chekov didn't question him too much, thank god, when he slid the file from beneath Chekov’s elbow. Chekov had the telephone pinched between ear and shoulder, listening to someone talk in a background monotone. He only gestured with a meaningful thumb pointed in warning back at Uhura's office door which was closed, the shades drawn for a private meeting with Captain Pike: _On the downlow._  

Sulu had only vague ideas of looking up Tamura's old address or something, or maybe of making discreet call to a buddy in LAPD to check their database for any potential suspects cross-referenced with the stolen car. It'd been less than three weeks since he and Kirk had been taken off the case, but Chekov and McCoy were busy with other cases to worry about, and the last thing anyone needed was this case going cold.  
  
A hand slapped down on the folder, snatching it out of his hands and pinning it to the desk. McCoy was glaring at him. "Why is Kirk messing with the suspects?" he demanded.  
  
"What?" Sulu gaped at him.  
  
"I called Dinshaw, tried to talk to him again. Got stone-walled, got told by his mom that they were going to sue us for harrassing her son because Kirk keeps badgering him. So I ask again, why is Kirk messing with our suspects?" 

“I don’t know.” 

“What’s he been doing on his days off?”  
  
This pissed Sulu off, which was a more welcome feeling than flabbergasted surprise. "Me? How should I know? I'm not his keeper."  
  
"You're supposed to keep him out of this investigation, Sulu!"  
  
"I am?"  
  
"Didn’t I call it? I called it. Trouble’s Kirk's middle name, and he's causing it. Did you see that black eye?" He pinched his lips together and breathed hard through his nose. "He's jeopardizing our goddamn investigation. And, he’s doing it behind our backs!"  
  
“I swear he’s not,” Sulu started, then realized he knew no such thing and the last thing he wanted to do was perjure hiself. "I'll talk to him," he finished. 

Chekov hung up the phone with a satisfied bang. “’Why Pavel, you’re on the phone. I’ll be quiet so you can hear very important information,’” he said with heavy sarcasm. 

McCoy glanced at Sulu, and their argument faded into shared amusement. 

“What.” Chekov said warily. “ _What_.” 

“Nothing,” Sulu said with a straight face. “We’re… _wery_ sorry.” He and McCoy stifled laughter. 

“Assholes.” Chekov only looked resigned, long used to ribbing from other cops about his accent. He had emigrated from Russia with his parents when he was 14, but traces of his accent had remained as a souvenir. “That’s funny, very funny. Like ten million times ago funny.” 

“Sorry,” Sulu said, once he got himself under control. 

“You’ve spent too much time with Jim, I think,” Chekov said primly. 

“Hey, Len’s laughing too!” 

“I am a bad, bad person.” McCoy was pressing his lips together into a tight line in an effort not to smile. “What news did you get, Pavel?” 

“Couple of things. Remember that shooting over on Geary? Mugging gone wrong, Richmond PD caught the suspect hocking the victim’s valuables at a pawnshop in–” 

“I don’t need to be here,” Sulu said. 

“Well, actually, you do,” said Chekov, waving him back. “That’s the other thing. Learned something interesting about your vic –“ 

“Tamura.“ 

“Yes, yes, Tamura –“ a look at being interrupted – “she moved up to the Bay Area a year ago, attended USF until she disappeared.” 

“Okay, this isn’t new information.” 

“Be quiet and listen. Can’t get any extra information from the boyfriend, because of your partner’s extracurricular activities,” another annoyed look, this time from McCoy, “but we talked to her classmates, some of her friends.” 

“She did come up here for a new start,” Sulu mused. “So?“ 

“She was majoring in…” Chekov snapped his fingers in the air a couple of times to jog his memory, then snatched back the file Sulu had been attempting to make off with. It was looking a bit sad now, bedraggled around the corners and creased where McCoy had slammed it to the desk  but he ignored that and flipped through the papers inside. “…Art history. Hoping to go to graduate school, get a PhD. She had an unpaid internship at the, um –” Chekov shuffled again. 

“SFMOMA.” McCoy put in patiently. “Museum of Modern Art.” 

“Yes. That. Thank you.” 

Sulu blinked, trying to understand what Chekov was getting at. “Okay. What was the call about, then?” 

Another impatient look, and Sulu was tempted to joke that Chekov spent too much time with McCoy now, except what came out of Chekov’s mouth wiped everything from his mind: “So she was having an affair. The head curator where she was interning, actually.” 

So that was probably where she'd been getting her expensive clothes. “What about her boyfriend, Dinshaw?” 

“What boyfriend, is the better question. Nobody remembers her having a boyfriend. They do remember him though. Mostly as a total creepy asshole who doesn’t know how to keep his hands to himself.” 

“Huh.” 

“You’d better tell Jim.” 

ooo

 

They were in full pursuit of a 1995 brown Pontiac full of suspects who’d shot up a hapless teenager who happened to be wearing the wrong colors on the wrong side of town. Careering down highway 101 with what looked like all the other units in the city in tow, they were thirty seconds away from getting called off, Sulu knew they were, because the Pontiac was zipping in and out of lanes, bumping over the median to the other side, and slewing wildly as if it were about to tip over. Sulu hung on for dear life and desprerately wished for the hundredth time in as many seconds that he hadn’t let Kirk jump in the driver's seat. They’d been writing up the shooting when the APB had picked up the suspects. They’d packed it in post haste, and Sulu hadn’t realized Kirk was driving until it’d been too late to do anything about it.

“Suspects are heading south on 280,” he read off the screen over the siren and the honking when other drivers didn’t get out of the way in time and Kirk laid on the horn. “CHP will join in Daly City.” They screeched across four lanes of almost-rush hour traffic. “ _Watch out for that—_ “  
  
"I got it, we’re gravy!" Kirk yelled back, hunched over the driver's wheel like a diabolical troll going for NASCAR glory. "Can you please not freak out like a granny when I’m driving? Because that's really distracting." 

“No? Not really? Because I don’t want to die?” 

“’Roo, I didn’t know if you’ve noticed –“ 

“ _Keep your eyes on the road!_ ” 

“–But you don’t want me distracted right now!” 

“God forbid,” muttered Sulu. Stamping on the floormat in reflexive braking motion did absolutely nothing when he was sitting on the passenger side. “If we live, we have _so_ much to talk about.” 

“Excuse me?” 

“Never mind.” 

“No, now I’m curious. Go for it!” 

“Forget it! Just drive!” 

“You’re distracting me now with my own curiosity!” As if to punctuate his point, Kirk twisted the wheel hard to the right and took the off ramp after the perps. The rear fishtailed. The car almost went into a spin, and as Kirk over-compensated with a wrench in the opposite direction, Sulu face-planted into the window with a splat. In another world this would’ve been almost comical, like some surreal Cheech and Chong slapstick, if he wasn't so very sure that he was going to end the day as a smear on the pavement. 

On the city streets, Kirk seemed to slow marginally. Sulu unstuck his face and gingerly fingered his cheekbone. “What were you going to say?” Kirk asked solicitously. 

Sulu took a breath. Fuck it. “Matthew Dinshaw.” Kirk gave him a sharp look, and swerved to avoid a taxi. “Why are you investigating him behind our backs? Do you think we wouldn’t find out? Was he the one who hit you?” 

Then they were airborne. Sulu had a brief impression of a fire hydrant, of metal rending, of water spurting everywhere, and then – they were flying. Later, he would sift through his memory like a miner panning for gold, searching for the _whys_ and _hows_ and _wherefores_. He would never know for sure if it’d been just a chance misjudgment on Kirk’s part, but he sure as hell knew that his timing was for shit and oh god why of all the times to attempt a conversation like that? 

When he came to, he was hanging suspended by his seat belt, upside down. This development was sadly unsurprising. 

He released his seatbelt and crashed onto his shoulder into the inverted roof , swearing and scrabbling like a turtle to right himself. He was totally unhurt. Not even a scratch. A peal of almost hysterical, adrenaline-fueled laughter escaped him. Maybe it was just Kirk’s insane luck, the same luck that favored the reckless, drunks, and children, but he was totally fine. The car was likely a dead loss and Uhura would be apoplectic, but that had been – sort of cool. _Far out_ , even. _Fucking radical_. 

Wait. He mentally slapped himself. What was he thinking? This was _not_ cool, not even remotely. What if they’d hit someone? Oh god. Shit shitshitshit– 

He realized at the same moment that Kirk was far from _fucking radical_. He was still in his seat, suspended above Sulu’s head. Moving sluggishly, disoriented little moans escaping him, all flailing arms and unseeing eyes rolled back to the whites and there was blood. God, there was blood everywhere. 

Sulu barely felt the flare of pain in his shoulder as he groped for Kirk’s face, pulse, limbs to make sure nothing was missing, probably violating every first aid rule in the book. Sulu was pretty, very, almost, 99% sure, that this was all his fault. 

The panic he hadn’t felt on his own behalf flooded him now and he found himself yelling Kirk’s name at a volume that was rather overwhelming in the closed space, struggling, fighting the hands that came from outside and dragged him through the busted window, into the light. 


	5. Chapter 5

“It’s okay, I’m fine,” Kirk said, swatting away Chapel’s fingers, which were poking none too gently at his face. She was pissed, and not bothering to hide it. Not that Sulu could blame her; he’d be pretty pissed at Kirk too, if he weren’t still shaky from shock. She’d butterfly clamped what she’d predicted would be a “ten stitcher” on Kirk’s temple and diagnosed a severe concussion, but he was refusing to go to the hospital. Other EMTs were triaging the suspects in the other car, which had crashed through a mailbox, a chain link fence, the window of an abandoned store, and had by some miracle missed all pedestrians. The suspects were fine – anyone who could bellow obscenities that loud weren’t about to flat-line in the next five minutes, in Sulu’s opinion – Kirk was fine, he was fine, everyone was fine. 

There had been so much blood. 

“Does this hurt?” she asked and poked something that made Kirk yelp before he could restrain himself. “Uh huh. Still not going to the hospital?” 

“Come on, Christine. They’re just going to stick me with needles and drug me, then send me home anyway and tell me to get some rest. I can skip the five hours of my life that I’ll be stuck there bored out of my mind and go straight home. Cut out the middle man.” 

“Young man, if’n you have a concussion, which I very much suspect that you do, they’ll keep you under observation overnight.” 

“I’m not going,” Kirk repeated mulishly. He didn’t look fine; he looked like he’d gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson and a man-eating puma. He was too pale. Blood had matted all the way down his neck and shoulders in a maroon stain, but at least he was lucid and talking. “You can’t make me.” 

Chapel set her lips in a thin, disapproving line. “You cops. Worse than firefighters.” She turned to Sulu. “Are you going to do something about him or what?” she demanded. 

Officer Gaila, who was standing next to Sulu, amusement in her eyes, elbowed him hard. “Yeah, Sulu.” 

“I can’t make him go to the hospital if he doesn’t want to,” Sulu said miserably. He felt just so guilty that this was, in fact, 99.99% his fault, what with his talent for epic bad timing and like, letting Kirk actually drive, but Chapel was doing more of that exploratory poking and prodding and Kirk was gritting his teeth, obviously trying not to yelp again. 

“Jesus. Isn’t it your duty to watch out for him? Considering that’s what… the fifth car you’ve crashed already? Uhura’s gonna plotz.” Gaila’s eyes danced, obviously relishing the idea. 

“Can you not?” Kirk jerked away from Chapel and oh, that was a bad idea, as he found himself suddenly on the ground, his head supported in Sulu’s lap. He blinked up at Sulu and Chapel. “God, my head. I don’t—I don’t feel so good—“ His eyes went unfocused. 

“Oh, there he goes,” Chapel said, blasé as hell even as her hands were busy checking his vitals. “I tell you guys to take it easy, but you all always do this weird macho bullshit—“ 

“Hey!” Gaila protested. “That’s sexist.” 

“You too, Maera,” she said severely. “Don’t forget I told you to get your back checked out the last time you threw it out flipping a perp, didn’t I?” 

ooo 

 

Kirk’s place was tiny, like San Francisco apartments tended to be unless you were one of the few who either got lucky or had a job that didn’t pay jack-all. It was even more bachelor pad than Sulu’s place; Sulu’s had had the dubious advantage of his sisters and one former live-in girlfriend to at least look like he hadn’t scavenged most of his furniture from dumpsters behind university dorms after move-out day, even if that meant he now had some odd ceramics and framed art of meaningless but visually pleasant shapes and colors, and towels in shades he would never have picked in a million years. Kirk’s place was strictly the as-is section of bottom basement Craigslist Ikea. 

Sulu had been in here exactly once before, and not in any condition resembling sober. But he found the key in something that looked exactly like what it was: a fake rock, in a fake plant next to the front door. It was so obvious and stupid that probably it even worked, Sulu thought, as he shook his head at the bronze key in his palm. 

It was a little sad, Sulu thought as he looked around the cluttered place that smelled vaguely sour from the dirty dishes piled in the sink. There’d been no one but Sulu to go pick up a spare pair of pajamas and a toothbrush for Kirk when he’d been admitted to the hospital. No family, no significant other, no ties at all. Except Sulu. It wasn’t just a little sad, Sulu revised, it was a _lot_ sad. 

The thought made Sulu uncomfortable. He grabbed a plastic bag out from under the sink and started throwing stuff into it. 

When he got back to the UCSF Medical Center, Kirk had vanished. Sulu followed the trail of irritated nurses running about to discover him trying to make good his escape into the stairwell, still attached to his IVs and monitoring equipment which were all beeping hysterically. 

Sulu could’ve sworn that when he’d left, Kirk had been doped to the gills. Kirk’s eyes were wild but unfocused but he was still trucking along, all drugged determination. How Kirk was still on his feet, Sulu couldn’t even begin to guess. 

“Where are you going?” Sulu inquired in as bored tones as possible, and Kirk snapped his head up. 

“Oh good, you’re here, Roo,” Kirk said and grabbed at him. “Get me the hell out of here, okay? Hospitals suck. Needles suck. And I’ve got tons stuck into me, and I am so done.” 

Sulu grabbed Kirk's restless head that was roving from side to side and stilled it. Kirk stared into his eyes from about two inches away as if he were attempting a herculean feat of telepathy, except Kirk’s irises were blown so wide the pupils couldn’t be seen and Sulu was pretty sure he wasn’t even in the same _galaxy_ at the moment. “Jim, you have a concussion. You’re disoriented, you’ve got a huge cut on your head that you got stitches for, so they just want to keep you around to keep an eye on you, okay? So why don’t we just…head back to your room?” 

He eventually got Kirk back into his bed with a bit of coaxing – he was the Jim Kirk Whisperer, he was – and now he was watching Kirk sleep in a totally non-creepy, completely appropriate way. 

It was funny – it hadn’t been his life that’d flashed before his eyes when the car flipped, it hadn’t been his that he’d regretted. Two seconds was a long time when you were certain you were going to die, and in the clarity of frozen motion he’d focused on how Kirk’s pallor had cycled all the way to the greenish white of panic, the way he had thrown his arms up as sky had replaced street, then how his eyes had slid to Sulu’s. 

“Stop staring at me,” Kirk said suddenly an eternity later, and Sulu realized he didn’t know how much time had gone by, except that Jerry Springer on the tv had changed to late night with Jay Leno. He’d probably been staring at Kirk for the entire time in what was undeniably a creepy fashion. 

So he didn’t deny it. “Yeah. Sorry.” 

This seemed to take Kirk by surprise, because he opened his eyes and studied Sulu. “I hate lots of things,” he said casually, as if they were continuing a conversation. “Like cold. And those mini marshmallows in instant cocoa. And olives on my pizza. But I’d happily deal with all those things just so I don’t have to be here.” 

“I can’t break you out,” Sulu pointed out. 

“I bet you could if you wanted to.” Kirk said. “There’s no such thing as ‘can’t. Only ‘won’t’. Precision in language, Roo. My third grade teacher taught me that.” 

“Fine, Master Yoda, I _won’t_ break you out. Maybe you missed the fact that you have a pretty serious concussion and your head’s bandaged up because you had to get fifteen stitches? And oh yes, let’s not forget that you were in a car that flipped over and nearly broke your head.” 

A nurse came in. Kirk cast an appraising eye at her but deflated as he took in her iron-gray hair, stature like a battleship, and a demeanor that would frighten drill sergeants. “Ten minutes until visiting hours are over,” she rapped out, writing something on his chart, and left. 

“Don’t make them chain you to the bed,” Sulu warned. “You might as well enjoy some downtime.” 

Kirk wiggled. “I can’t. I – We have a lot of work to get done.” 

“Oh. Like Matthew Dinshaw.” 

Kirk stilled his restless tossing. “How did you know about that?” 

Sulu tried to smile. “Kirk. I’m a detective. And I’m _Hikaru Sulu_.” 

Kirk didn’t laugh. “You know, that’s only funny when I say it.” 

“I think it’s about time that you learned you’re not nearly as funny as you think.” 

“Hm. Probably.” He was staring at the tv now, where Leno was interviewing some musician Sulu didn’t recognize. “Are you pissed at me?” 

God, Sulu would’ve bet anything that had come out a lot more vulnerable than Kirk had intended, and he took a moment before answering. “Not really? Should I be?” Christ, he sounded like his mom. 

“You sound like my mom,” Kirk said. “And. Well. I was going to tell you.” 

“Tell me what, exactly?” 

“The Camry. The stolen car. I traced the records and its owner at the DMV. It’s registered to a Katherine Morales-Hammell, right. But get this – she’s Dinshaw’s _aunt_.” 

Sulu sat there, dumbfounded. 

Then surprise faded to bewilderment, a queer sense of betrayal, then transitioned into spectrums of pure fury. “Are we partners or not, Kirk?” Sulu nearly shouted. “You asked me to trust you, and you keep doing shit like this without telling me? You could get us fired, and for what?” 

“It’s important to me,” Kirk said, and there was an edge to his tone. 

“But _why_? You don’t tell me _shit_. You just give me the runaround and expect me to go along with whatever crazy agenda you have going, and you know what? No. Just no. You can’t just tell Pavel or Len about your ideas and you have do this one on your own? Okay, I get it, you loved this girl. But you have to let it go. Why are you going to let it ruin your career? Just _tell_ me.” 

Leno continued quacking in the background. The tinned applause rang loud and false against Kirk’s silence. 

“Excuse me.” The nurse glared at him from the doorway. “This is a quiet ward, sir. You need to keep your voice down. And visiting hours are over.” 

Sulu couldn’t rail against the wall of Kirk’s defenses. He was tired. “Fine,” he said, not really knowing who he was saying it to. “Whatever. I’m out.” He stormed out of the room, accidentally body-checking the nurse in his haste. He ignored her squawk of rage. 

ooo 

 

Flouncing – because flouncing it was, according to Kirana the next morning. It was a beautiful day, with that grayish haze edging the blue sky that harbinged a scorcher, but it was night for her in Shanghai and she was tired and therefore, impatient and snippy. So she disabused him of the notion that it had been anything more than ‘flouncing’ five minutes into their conversation. 

Well. Flouncing would’ve been more effective if he didn’t have to return to the hospital that afternoon to drive Kirk home. 

“Roo, we know you’re not the easiest guy to talk to. And this is obviously something hard for him to talk about.” 

“You’re missing the point,” Sulu sighed. 

“That’s notthe point. When did you ever really try to be friends with him, huh?” 

“Hel- _lo_ , I dragged his drunk ass home multiple times?” Okay, that wasn't true, but his sister would never know. 

“That’s not being friendly, that’s just being a good citizen. Dude. God knows I love my little brother, but you are such a prudish asshole when it comes to doing something off the books, and I’m sure he knows it too. So you tell me why he should tell you anything that’ll just make you yell at him more?” 

“I don’t yell—“ he yelled into the phone, then caught himself. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Okay. I see what you’re doing. Trying to make me feel bad. I see. Did you forget the part where he can get me suspended or even fired? _Nearly_ got me suspended? Let’s not forget about that.” 

“What is it with boys and not talking about their feelings?” 

“Wait. You have feelings that you talk about?” 

“Well, I do feel like murdering my little brother sometimes,” she laughed. “Like that time you were three and ate half my crayons. See, feelings _._ Was that so hard?” 

“It’s not feelings we’re talking about here. I’m talking about him not telling me really vital information and me being really really pissed off at him.” 

“Uh huh. And flouncing.” 

“I didn’t flounce _._ “ 

“What you should have done was stick around and work out your issues like an adult. You’re a cop, don’t you know how to interrogate people?” 

“He’s a cop, too. He’d know what I was doing. And you missed the part where I’m pissed at him.” 

“God, this is such a circular conversation. I have to go. I’m really tired, and I have a power lunch and then a conference tomorrow.” 

“You actually call it ‘power lunch’?” 

“Yes. It’s this thing that people with power and money do to help with making the oodles of money while having the company pay for the food. You wouldn’t understand. I’ve gotta go, y _ou_ talk to Kirk. Be his friend. Is he cute? Maybe I should’ve asked that before.” 

“Oh my god. I don’t think that way about my own part—“ 

“Liar,” Kirana said gleefully. “He’s a hottie, huh?” 

“ _No_ , you giant perv. You and Akiko, I can’t believe I’m even related to you. Kill me now.” 

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks. Take pics with your phone and email them to me!” 

“I can’t believe I’m having this conversation again,” Sulu nearly moaned. 

“Be good,” she told him, and hung up. 

ooo 

 

The Peet’s on Van Ness was crowded as usual, loud with drinks being called and the high whir of the espresso machine and the hum of conversation. Sulu liked it that way. He and Chekov took a coffee break there at least once a day. It was an ideal place to chat and complain about their partners and not be heard – or talk about a case that he was technically not supposed to be involved in. 

At the moment, Sulu was rolling his eyes so hard it felt as if he would sprain something as Chekov charmed a group of women holding a power meeting, looking cute and dimpled and tousled, flirting and saying many pretty things until he rejoined Sulu on the other side of the coffee-scented room, dragging an extra chair and table behind him. The women were rearranging themselves and looking as dazed as ants whose path had been suddenly erased. 

Sulu rolled his eyes once again, in case Chekov missed it the first fifteen times. “You’re shameless,” he said, with an air of someone who had long borne this cross. 

“They were nice,” Chekov said, grinning wickedly. “Look, they offered me a chair. And this table. And this danish.” 

“I think they wanted you to sitdown, not steal their – look, never mind. You’re worse than Jim.” 

“Why, thank you. Why don’t you go over and flirt with that nice barista over there, and get me an extra shot of espresso in this.” He rattled his drink at Sulu. 

“That’s a guy.” 

“What? He is?” Chekov did a mock double-take. “I had no idea!” 

“I’m not –” 

“So the prints on the card came back,” Chekov said. Sulu tried to say, “Uh huh,” except he’d been in the middle of a sentence while trying to start a new one and drinking at the same time, so his double foam latte went down the wrong tube. He spent the next minute coughing. 

“Maybe you are too invested in this case,” Chekov said when he’d stopped and caught his breath. “Because nobody reacts that way to such boring news except you.” 

“I didn’t. Was there a match?” asked Sulu impatiently. 

Chekov peeled a straw and stuck it into his iced mocha. “Yeah,” he said, drawing out the suspense. “Remember Matthew Dinshaw?” 

“The non-boyfriend boyfriend.” 

Chekov nodded. “The non-boyfriend stalker creep.” 

“Anything else? A print off a card from a flower bouquet that she threw away isn’t exactly what I call solid evidence.” 

“Not impressed, huh? Prints on the car came back too. Inconclusive.” 

“Great, just great. What about hair and fiber?” 

“You know how the state labs are.” 

Sulu nodded in agreement, glumly. The state forensics labs were understaffed, underfunded, and chronically delayed. Unless it was for a high-profile case, forensic analysis could take anywhere from six months to a year. 

“And the curator sugar daddy?” 

Chekov gave him a look. “The curator took some persuading—“ a faint grin that Sulu knew meant his interview had taken on the tones of something akin to blackmail “—but he was at a conference in New York at the time. With his wife, who never did receive all those nice expensive presents he bought.” He grinned around a foam moustache. “This case will be one for the forensics, Hikaru, you’ll see. We must be patient. But we aren’t out here for us to rehash what the files tell us. What’s the real reason you got me out here?” 

Sulu told him what Kirk had found. It was still circumstantial evidence, but very compelling evidence nonetheless, enough to cast a very long shadow in Dinshaw’s direction. But the DA wouldn’t take it just yet, they decided. They would wait for something conclusive to come back from forensics, but in the meantime, they’d get a search warrant, and keep a very close eye on Dinshaw. If he made even one move like he was going to make a break for it, they’d slam him in the jug so fast his fashionably styled head would spin. 

“We have to be careful,” Sulu said. “If he thinks we’re getting too close, he might decide to take a permanent vacation to South America.”

“He’s probably suspicious enough if Jim’s been hassling him,” Chekov added. “Did you talk to Jim about that?” 

Sulu twisted his cup around in its cardboard sleeve. “Not yet. I guess I’ll talk to him when I pick him up from the hospital today.” 

“Wait. I thought he asked Len to drive him home.” 

“ _What?”_  

ooo 

 

Kirk wasn’t picking up, and the phone in the hospital room kept ringing. Len didn’t pick up, but that was to be expected since he let all his calls go straight to voicemail on principle unless the caller ID indicated it was from the precinct. Sulu went to the hospital anyway. It was childish to have this feeling of betrayal that Kirk had just assumed that Sulu wanted nothing more to do with him, that he’d gone beyond Sulu and reached out to McCoy, but there it was, and he needed to see it for himself. 

He hadn’t even known McCoy and Kirk were that good of friends. 

Kirk’s room was newly occupied by an ED – emotionally disturbed – Asian man who was convinced Sulu was both his long lost son and a demon out to eat his soul. It took an entire team of nurses, doctors, and syringes to subdue the guy, and Sulu staggered back out to his car minus five years of his life and covered in orange juice. 

With the help of the trusty fake rock, he burst into Kirk’s apartment with all the righteous fury of the seriously inconvenienced. “What the fuck, Kirk? You went home with somebody else _?_ ” God, that sounded so stupid and jealous and histrionic and all sorts of other unreasonable adjectives. 

Kirk looked up from the couch. “Why?” he simply replied. “You didn’t tell me you were coming.” The remote, polite interest in his voice stung. It was as if Sulu were a stranger, not…not whatever they were. 

“I just –“ he deflated. “You should have told me,” he finished, wondering what karma he’d incurred in a past life that he had to keep repeating himself. “I went to the hospital and everything.” 

“Oh,” Kirk said. “Well. Thank you.” 

They looked at each other. 

“This isn’t working, is it?” Sulu said softly. 

“No,” Kirk said. “No, it isn’t.” 

“I—I can request a new partner,” Sulu faltered as Kirk seemed to freeze into immobility, only knowing in the deep welling dismay that had been a part of him for the last couple weeks, that this is the last thing that he wanted to do, but he couldn’t think of anything else. “I can’t keep doing this. We need to trust each other, and—“ 

“I trust you,” Kirk said. 

“But I don’t trust _you_. You keep things from me, things that I should know. I’m not capable of blind faith. I can’t keep doing this. I can’t work with someone that I don’t trust.” 

“Like what _?_ I told you about what I found out about Dinshaw. I’m not sneaking around behind your back though you seem to think I am—“ 

“Why did you leave LAPD, Jim?” 

“That’s none of your business.” 

“Yeah. _That’s_ why I can’t trust you. I know it has something to do with your ex-girlfriend, okay? I hear rumors, okay? and Uhura hinted at it, and nobody transfers to a new city unless they have a damn good reason, and if it has to do with Tamura, it involves _me_ , because this was also _my_ case _._ I think I have a right to know.” 

“You drive me _nuts_ ,” Kirk nearly shouted. That poleaxed Sulu so hard he could only splutter incoherently for a moment. 

“ _Me?”_  

“You think you’re so cool and rational about things,” Kirk growled. He surged to his feet and paced the living room. “You always think you’re right and in charge, and I try to be friends with you but you hate me and there’s never any pleasing you.” 

 _I don’t hate you_. “It was bad, wasn’t it.” 

“Fine. You want to know? You want to know how bad a cop I am?” He collapsed onto the couch again like a deflated balloon. “You’ll hate me.” 

“I thought you said I already do.” Sulu mentally punched himself. 

That got the ghost of a grin. “Right. Guess I have nothing to lose, huh?” 

Sulu waited. 

“I met Tamura when we were both at UCLA. We dated for two years.” He stopped and appeared to consider how to continue. “We broke up when I graduated, but it was over long before that. We both liked to party and drink, yeah, but she’d started getting into some really heavy stuff. Dealing, probably. Smuggling, maybe. I wanted to be a cop like my dad so I couldn’t be involved in that.” 

Sulu sank down into a beanbag chair opposite him, listening intently. 

“But we kept in touch. She was also my CI – which. Yeah. You’re not supposed to have a personal relationship with your informants. Then she got involved in a mess and I – I helped her out. And got caught. It all came out, and I almost got terminated.” 

“And Pike did you a favor.” 

Kirk laughed, but it was mirthless, harsh. “Well. Pike did my _dad_ a favor. Like, in his memory. My dad was his training officer, way back when.” 

Sulu let himself recline in the beanbag, stretching out his legs and staring at the ceiling. Well. It’d been bad, but not nearly as bad as he’d feared. He didn’t know what he’d expected, really – maybe that Kirk had been sacked for excessive force, or that he’d slept with the police commissioner’s daughter or something. 

Maybe he should stop ranking Kirk that way, he thought. 

“So. I transferred here. And then I find out she’s dead, and I know that if I’d tried harder to get her out of that lifestyle, to get her some help—“ 

He thought of telling Kirk that people could only be helped if they wanted help, but Kirk probably knew that anyway. 

“—so I want to get the person who did it, okay? And I thought it was Mihara, because he was the one who got her into that scene in the first place.” Kirk stopped and studied his hands, which have been clenched into the velour of the hideous Craigslist couch. His expression was broken. 

“Sometimes,” Sulu said slowly, “Bad things just happen to people for no reason at all. Sounds stupid, but I really don’t think it was anything as dramatic as her past catching up with her, or anything. She just…was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” 

“Yeah. I’m getting that.” Kirk rubbed his eyes. 

“I don’t hate you.” 

This surprised a chuckle from Kirk. “That’s good to know.” 

“In fact, I do like you. Most of the time. I—“ he stopped. Shit, he was so bad at this. Kirana and Akiko would slap him silly for being so awkward. “Look, would you like to come for dinner on Sunday?” 

At the comic look of surprise on Kirk’s face, he blurted, “I mean, not like a _date_. Just—at my parents’ house. We always have Sunday dinner together. Akiko would love to meet you, and Pavel always comes—“ 

“That’s because Pavel is a mooch,” Kirk said, but he was beginning to smile. 

“So yeah. I don’t hate you or anything. At least, most of the time.” 

Kirk got up and crossed the room to him, skirting the milk crate that was masquerading as a coffee table, and crouched in front of him. “You’re really bad at this, aren’t you?” 

“That’s what Kirana says.” He squirmed under the intense gaze Kirk was giving him and oh god, he was so near that Sulu’s skin prickled. 

“That’s not what I meant.” Kirk smiled and leaned in. 

It happened with such a unnatural progression that Sulu didn’t realize it was going to happen until it did. But he didn’t stiffen with surprise, and oh, he remembered this, that night that seemed an age ago. Except now the sour tang of alcohol and the ashen taste of cigarettes didn’t flood into Sulu’s mouth, only the warmth slickness of Kirk’s tongue and the intake of his breath that seemed to suck Sulu’s breath from his lungs in a slow rush and left him gasping in its wake. 

“Sorry.” Kirk was holding his head, all apologetic, and looking like he’d like to beat it straight through the wall. “I shouldn’t have done that.” This was a first; Sulu wasn’t used to people apologizing after kissing him. 

“Will you shut up?” Sulu groaned. “Just this once?” 

Kirk froze, processing this. “Excuse me?” 

Sulu wanted to say many things, like how Kirk made everything his fault, like how he hated it when Kirk got all emo, but as usual he couldn’t manage to get out all the words in his head. He put his hand on Kirk’s shoulder and squeezed. From there, almost without volition, it went to Kirk’s neck, and then his cheek, prickly with bristle, and let it speak all the words he couldn’t say. 

Sulu could feel the muscles of Kirk’s jaw jumping under his palm. He had a moment of doubt, and took his hand away hastily. “I’m not good with words,” Sulu said, feeling that awkward silence stretching between them again. “I’m not – I think a lot of things but it gets all jumbled up before they come out –“ he stopped, looking at Kirk, whose blue eyes were considering him seriously. “Can we—can this just not be complicated? Or – unless – never mind. I don’t know if we can have any other mode _but_ complicated–“ 

Kirk’s lips were hard and this one was a really shit kiss – not that Sulu had had a lot of experience kissing dudes before, drunk or no. When you were drunk everything seemed rainbows and puppies, and sex and anything involving skin to skin was awesome, but no, this was definitely in the category of suck, because Kirk was using his tongue like a cork. A cork for Sulu’s mouth, and Sulu sputtered because—no two whats about it – it was gross. 

In his spluttering he thought he accidentally bit Kirk’s tongue. Or, it would’ve been a bite if Kirk hadn’t been a little more precipitous in pulling it back, and yeah. So it was more of a scrape of his teeth along Kirk’s tongue, and yeah, gross. 

“This whole kissing someone to shut them up doesn’t work too well,” Kirk said, almost to himself. 

“Yeah, because that sucked balls,” Sulu said. He couldn’t even remember how this had happened. The past few days had taken a whole new color of surreal – car chase, car crash, hospital, yelling at Kirk, more yelling at Kirk, then…then Kirk, squatting there in between Sulu’s thighs – oh god – as if he couldn’t decide if he wanted to sock Sulu in the face or try to plug his mouth again. Sulu didn’t find either option particularly appealing. 

“ _You_ suck balls,” Kirk said back automatically. His eyes crinkled, and then ensued the type of conversation only possible between boys – and young ones at that – about who sucked balls, you suck balls for infinity, you suck _gigantic_ balls, you suck your momma’s balls, and they were laughing, and things were cool between them again. 

“Jim,” Sulu said after a moment. “Can we establish some ground rules here? Some I thought we had going from the beginning but I’m starting to realize we didn’t? Just. Don’t lie to me anymore.” 

“You bit me,” Kirk said, as if he hadn’t spoken. 

“Your kiss blew ballsacks, we established that.” Irritated, because Kirk was being avoidant again, and he had realized long ago that he hated that more than anything. 

“So you’re not…anti-being kissed?” 

“Christ. The lieutenant’s right, your prioritizing skills need some serious work.” It was suddenly hard to return Kirk’s gaze now, who was staring at him with those intense blue eyes that seemed to flay him open down to his very core. Sulu realized that Kirk was silently twisting his words around on him so they stared him in the face: _D_ _on_ _’t lie to me_ _, either_ _._  

It started out as comfort, Sulu thought later, chaste and close-mouthed, but Kirk smelled good and his hand was so warm and rough against Sulu’s skin. Somewhere it turned into a slow burn, all moist breath and the drag of skin against pliant skin. Sulu didn’t know where to put his hands; they hovered uncertainly until Kirk abruptly bit Sulu’s lower lip and they clamped onto Kirk’s upper arms. 

“Your head—“ he breathed, and Kirk growled in frustration, “Don’t worry about it,” and grabbed his cock. Sulu flailed himself off the beanbag. Kirk came after him and then they were kissing again, Kirk sprawled on top of him, hands expertly pulling his shirt from his pants, unbuckling, unbuttoning. Sulu’s tie flew gracefully across the room to land on a lamp shaped like a hula girl. 

“You have way too many clothes on,” Kirk grunted, working him out of his undershirt and trying to push down Sulu’s trousers with his toes at the same time, and Sulu was about to protest that maybe Kirk didn’t have _enough_ , only wearing a sweatshirt and sweatpants and nothing else, as he pushed his hands down to grab at Kirk’s ass, half-giddy at his boldness. He wasn’t going to let Kirk have all the fun, he was determined. Then Kirk’s mouth closed on his neck and sucked as he pinched a nipple, and Sulu’s back arched off the grubby carpet and he decided that maybe they both had way too many clothes on. 

It was awkward, and messy, and wet, as first times generally are; it was also hot and sweaty and Sulu discovered how ticklish Kirk’s thighs were as he attempted what he was sure was the worst blowjob Kirk had ever received. Kirk jackknifed over him, overcome with snorting laughter. 

Sulu sat up, wiping his mouth, and glared at him, more than a little irritated that Kirk was laughing through Sulu’s first blowjob _ever_. If Kirk didn’t stop that in about thirty seconds Kirk’s chances of ever getting another was going to go down to zero, and the chances of him having something very valuable bitten off went up a hundred-fold. “How do you ever receive blowjobs if you’re that ticklish?” he demanded. 

Kirk’s laughter dried up, though his eyes continued to dance, as he pulled Sulu up alongside him. “I don’t,” he said. “I’m usually the giver, not the receiver.” And he slid down to demonstrate. 

Well. Damned if he was going to let Kirk pat him on the head and move on like a teacher comforting a cute and precocious child who is failing at fingerpaints, but – priorities. 

A dangerous shiver of teeth right where teeth were most unwelcome. Then, a contrite lap that made him prickle all over, “Hikaru.” Another lap. Then the slowest, agonizing circle – “Roo.” 

He swallowed with a dry click. “W—what? _Fuck!_ ” 

“Ooh.” Kirk grinned up at him. “I like that.” 

“This isn’t my first time having my dick sucked,” Sulu snapped. Well, it’d been a first time for _that_ – that whatever Kirk had just done with his finger. “Get on with it.” 

“Hikaru, for once will you just let me drive?” He smiled and lay his head on Sulu’s thigh. “You don’t need to be in control all the time.” 

Sulu blinked, flushed. Kirk jabbed a finger into his belly. “Stop thinking so much. Stop that. Just go with this, okay?” His eyes pleaded with Sulu: _Trust me. Do you trust me_? 

It was more than the crick in his neck, the burn of his abdominals, that made him lay back down and stare at the at unfortunate popcorn ceiling again. It wasn’t Kirk he didn’t trust; he didn’t trust _himself_. To take that leap of faith. To trust himself to deal with the ground rushing up at him too fast if the gamble failed. 

That he could – he stopped. 

Oh god, he was laying here naked with Kirk. Kirk, who looked way too good naked than all the justice in the world could account for, something he would’ve minded more if Kirk hadn’t been naked for _his_ benefit. Kirk, who was offering sex and that something more than sex that promised would be pretty world-shaking, and Sulu was psychoanalyzing himself instead. 

Yeah. 

He reached out and pushed back the worry-lines that had appeared on Kirk’s brow. Kirk blinked, tilting his head slightly into Sulu’s touch. “You still can’t drive my car,” Sulu told him, and Kirk burst out laughing. 

ooo

 

That was the first part. It was as if Kirk couldn’t get enough of Sulu, and Sulu was assiduously ignoring that traitor overanalytical part of his brain so he could admit to himself that he kind of sort of adored every freckle and ticklish spot on Kirk’s body, stupid and soppy as that sounded. 

Which was good, because there were a lot. 

But the really attractive thing about Kirk was how comfortable he was in his own skin, as comfortable totally naked as he was clothed. Sulu himself wasn’t totally anti-stripping-off at the beach, but he was aware that he was too thin and maybe he should work on his calves a little bit and his knees were a bit knobby. Kirk moved as if he’d been made before the Garden of Eden and the discovery of shame. 

At some point they relocated off the totally disgusting carpet of the living room to the somewhat less disgusting bedroom and the much more comfortable bed, though Sulu didn’t really want to know when Kirk had last changed his sheets, because then he’d have to scrub his skin off with bleach and _Oh god focus, will you? Priorities_. 

This was something Sulu didn’tneed much practice in, wrapping both arms around Kirk from behind and jacking him off, mouthing at his neck and tasting the tender area just behind his ear. Smelling the coconut shampoo Kirk used as Kirk leaned backwards into him and made noises and a bunch of strung-together obscenities that would have put porn stars and sailors to shame. 

It was pretty ridiculously hot, and he kind of wanted to just touch Kirk all over and make him shake and say his name just like that forever.


	6. Chapter 6

At five, as Sulu was deciding he was going to spend the rest of his life plotting to get his dick into Kirk’s mouth at every opportunity, SFPD served a search warrant on Matthew Dinshaw’s home. 

At seven, the phone woke Sulu up from a sated slumber. He flailed around until he realized where he was, then got up and promptly tripped over the shoes, socks, clothes, and the ugly stuffed animal that was on the floor, on the way back to his pants and his phone. “Whuh?” he said succinctly at it and fumbled until he realized that it was upside down. He wasn’t normally this disoriented when waking up from a nap, but marathon sex with Kirk was _exhausting_. 

His brain stuttered. Sex. _With Kirk_. He was sore and sticky in…in everywhere. The culprit was laying curled into his pillow like a cooked shrimp, still out to the world. 

“Roo? Hello?” 

“Pavel? That you?” He cleared his throat, glanced at Kirk, and went into the living room, closing the door behind him. “Hey.” 

“How’s Jim?” Chekov asked, but Sulu could tell he was about as interested in the answer at the moment as he was in the yearly gross domestic product of Peru, so instead Sulu said, coming more and more awake with each word: “He’s fine. Has something happened? What’s going on?” 

“Uhh.” Chekov paused and seemed to be searching for the right words. 

“ _What happened, Pavel?”_  

A faint voice, growing louder in the background behind Chekov’s consternation: “Oh for chrisssakes. Give me that. Just—git! Sulu? Hikaru, you there?” 

“Len, what the hell?” 

“Look, kid. You want the good news or the bad news?” 

Bad. Bad always came first to get the worst shock over with. But then, the good hardly ever outweighed the bad in these scenarios. “Give me the good.” 

“Okay. So about two hours ago me and Pavel here executed a search warrant on your boy, Dinshaw. And yeah, before you freak, we called you. Didn’t have to, but we did, and your ass didn’t pick up or call back, so it’s not on us. That’s assuming I even give a fuck, and that’s not even the point.” Triumph entered his voice. “We found Tamura’s laptop in his room, confirmed 100% it’s hers. He didn’t even bother to wipe the harddrive or even change the log-in info. Kids these days, lazy little shits.” 

“Hey!” came Chekov’s voice in the background. “A shit I may be, but lazy I am not.” 

McCoy ignored him. “Got the probable cause with Jim’s info. Dinshaw’s even got some of her clothes and her purse. We’ve got him dead to rights, Hikaru.” 

“Okay. Okay. Yeah. Uh. Wow. Congrats, you guys, that’s – So what’s the bad news?” 

“He evaded being detained from the officers on the scene. There’s a warrant and APB out for his arrest. We called you to let you know, seeing as it’s your day off and probably ignoring the police bands and probably even the news.” 

“Wait, you lost him? Just now? How did you lose him?” 

“How should I know?” McCoy said irritably. “The asshole can run fast.” 

“The media know yet? 

“They’re gonna. And then Uhura will be on our asses.” 

“Wow, man. Just – wow. Yeah. I mean, congrats? But at the same time, un-congrats.” 

Sulu hung up on McCoy’s frenzied swearing – Uhura was once again right; McCoy was going to have a coronary one day if he didn’t learn some stress management skills – and walked back into the bedroom. Kirk was out like a light and determinedly so; even with all the poking, clapping, and ‘Hey!’ Sulu could muster got barely a twitch out of him. 

Sulu stood there, thinking. Then he leaned over and titty-twistered Kirk as hard as he could. 

It was a pity, as he’d spent not three hours ago discovering how sensitive they were, but it worked. Kirk came awake, with such a Spock-like yowl Sulu had to grin despite his bad news. 

“Fuuuck,” Kirk gasped, rubbing at his chest. “Good christ, why _.”_

Sulu leaned in and brushed his lips against Kirk's in apology, still wondering at himself at the naturalness, the casualness of it, and the total lack of…alarm in his brain. “Get up starshine,” he said. “I’ve got some news for you.” 

ooo

 

As far as SFPD knew, Dinshaw had bailed town. He’d come around the corner, saw the police at his house and had run, melting into thin air despite an all-out manhunt that went on for a week. Really fucking unusual for a kid who’d barely cracked the legal drinking age. Dinshaw’s mother had no idea where he could be, and a canvas of his aquaintances quickly revealed that he had no friends to speak of, much less friends who would stick their necks out to harbor a fugitive. 

At least the case was solved. Forensics came back not two days later and confirmed what they already knew. Sometime after Tamura had been killed, Dinshaw had gone over to his aunt’s home and taken the car. Fibers in the car had matched Dinshaw’s clothing, which had been seized in the search. Blonde hairs matching Dinshaw’s had been found in the backseat and also Tamura's clothes. 

They’d been so, so close. It was frustrating. 

Tempers were a bit despondent in the beginning, especially Kirk’s, who seemed to take this inconclusive ending as a personal insult. There was relief, of course, that the mystery had been solved, but the case would never be completely closed until Dinshaw was behind bars. Kirk seemed to be happier overall, though, lighter somehow. He was back to his previous joking self at least, with that brashness that Sulu had once thought was arrogance and now thought was sorta charming. 

Several weeks went by. Overtime was had. Dinshaw’s face quickly became another in a mosaic of other fugitives from the law, on the bulletin boards of post offices and on the police website, and as the days dragged on Kirk seemed to be in a holding pattern, waiting for something to happen. Waiting for Dinshaw to be caught, waiting for Sulu. 

Sulu didn’t know what he wanted, didn’t know what they were, except that now they’d – at least he thought they had – had reached a concordance, or something quite a bit beyond a truce.

Whatever it was involved a slowly evolving intimacy and a ridiculous amount of sex that made Sulu blush to think about. 

Now their 10 hour days spent together in the car, in meetings, in briefings, in community talks were punctuated now and again with pit stops to do things that Sulu vehemently protested in the beginning but Kirk always managed to talk him into, like sex in the back seat. It was gross and frightening and exhilarating all at the same time, and Sulu was very determined that it wouldn’t happen again. Until the next time it happened. 

As of the second week, it’d happened three times. 

That was all Kirk’s fault. 

So life went on, the search went on, overtime was had, lots of sexwas had pretty much everywhere, a few Sunday dinners were skipped. But Sulu, never a hugely optimistic person, was pretty sure Dinshaw had beat feet out of town. Unless they got lucky or Dinshaw got careless, they likely would never see him again. 

But in the end, it ended so simply it was almost stupid. 

It went like this: 

They were at a gas station on Sunday, three months after the discovery in the trunk, twenty-three days after Dinshaw had ridden off into the sunset. 

Sulu had picked Kirk up from his apartment, readying for the drive to Sausalito. He was filling up the WRX on Broadway, scolding himself for not having filled up outside the city because damn, almost four-fifty for basic unleaded was highway robbery. 

He was aware that most of his irritation was disguised nervousness about the upcoming dinner. It wasn’t the first time he’d brought a – his mind skittered away from the word _boyfriend_ – friend home, Chekov being a prime example, but it sure felt like it. 

If only because he knew Akiko was going to be embarrassing as hell. And Kirana might be there, too. 

Oh god, maybe this was a mistake. 

Kirk pushed his way out the door of the little gas station convenience store, his arms full of candy and beef jerky. Not bothering to check either direction as always, he stepped off the curb, walking towards the car. When their eyes met, Sulu remembered: _oh yeah. No more overthinking_. _Because everything will be fine._   And it was fine, Kirk smiling at him with the bright sunlight picking out golden highlights in his hair and eyelashes, walking with that loose-hipped stride as if he always had all the time in the world. 

The door to the restroom set into the side of the store opened and a man came out. A young guy whose face Sulu knew, had seen in person twice, a face whose photo he had tucked behind his badge, ready to be pulled out for showing to any potential witnesses. 

The gas nozzle clicked off, but he didn’t notice. Reaching through the driver’s side window, he popped open the glove compartment with movements that felt like he was moving through molasses, and pulled out his gun. He needed a clear sightline, needed to get Dinshaw down without using deadly force. Firing a shot would be an incredibly bad idea in a gas station. 

Five seconds, and Kirk would be far enough away to not be a target. “Get my back,” he said side mouth to Kirk as he turned around, gun down by his side, and thank god, Kirk was quick on the uptake. Continuing on as if everything was normal, he dumped his load of junk food into the front seat and turned, smirk on his face as if wondering if Sulu was pulling a joke on him. 

Dinshaw had paused by the trash can next to the doors of the convenience store, fishing around in his pockets and dumping out a motley collection of tissues and crumpled receipts. He looked thinner than before, more haggard. Wherever he’d been, he’d been living rough. 

Kirk saw him the same moment Dinshaw noticed them, and it was like a spark being applied to dynamite. Sulu had been readying as low key an arrest as he could manage – an easy, “Hey, Matthew Dinshaw?” then slipping handcuffs on him easy as peasy, but no. Kirk went for his own piece and Dinshaw bolted. 

No place to run but past the two of them – Dinshaw went for a full body slide across the hood of Sulu’s car, the studs on his too tight jeans giving an agonizing _skreeeeeeeek_ that imprinted itself into Sulu’s brain and Sulu's vision went just a little red as he brought up his elbow and Dinshaw’s face ran full tilt into it. Dinshaw went down like a sack of flour. 

“Asshole, that’s my _car_ , and you’re under _arrest_ ,” Sulu panted down at him as Kirk rounded the trunk, gun drawn, face taut and unreadable. 

Later on, Sulu wondered if he’d been distracted by Kirk. Kirk didn’t look relieved or happy, or any of the other usual emotions someone who’d just successfully arrested someone should look. For that half-second his focus splintered, long enough for Dinshaw, nose spectacularly broken and gushing, to reach behind and under the dirty sweatshirt to pull out a knife that looked roughly the size of Texas. 

In the next second, he could hear the beginning of Kirk’s shout and his own gasp even as he had the time to think, _Well. Isn’t this awesome._ Sulu felt it go in, slicing through his shoulder like butter before the blade stuck on bone, followed by a universe of focused pain as if he’d just been righteously poked by the hand of God. He wasn’t wearing his vest. Not that it would’ve helped, because by luck or by calculation Dinshaw had gotten him right there, where there would’ve been no coverage anyway. 

As he fell to the ground he saw Kirk, with quick rage twisting his face, knock Dinshaw to the ground and train his gun to Dinshaw’s head. Sulu tried to say, _D_ _o_ _n’t shoot him_ but nothing came out but a wheeze. The knife was still stuck in him and god, stay awake because Kirk was looking like he wanted to kick Dinshaw maybe to death and oh god, don’t do that, don’t shoot him, you're better than him. He didn’t know if he said it aloud to just to himself.  The perp was disarmed and cameras were watching, and this was the sort of thing that ended careers, he thought. Don’t hurt him. 

Maybe Kirk heard. 

Or maybe Sulu had once again underestimated Kirk, because there was no gunshot, no screams of someone being beaten. His hands were on Sulu, his worried face in his, blocking the glaring sun. Sulu could feel Kirk’s sweat dripping on his face and he could smell his aftershave, in the far away detached part of his brain high above the screaming galaxy of hurt that was his upper chest, just before Sulu passed out.


	7. Chapter 7

When someeone gets stabbed on tv, they're okay after. When you get stabbed in real life, you stay in the hospital for weeks.

The hospital, when he woke up, sucked as much as he’d feared. He thought this was the same  room Kirk had been in. Even more depressingly, McCoy’s idea of cheering him up was reminding him that it could always be worse: he could have a cot in the goddamn hallway. 

Or, you know, be dead. 

McCoy said that last bit to him with extra relish, and looked enormously pleased with himself at his own wit. 

Sulu stared at him. He was picturing the ridiculous motivational posters Captain Pike insisted on hanging in his office – it added just the right accent to every meeting, Pike firmly believed, especially when he was reaming some poor sack with a backdrop of posters exhorting _GREATNESS,_ or _ACHIEVEMENT_.  

Sulu could imagine it now:

 _GRATITUDE_  
 _Because it could be worse:_   
_You could have a cot in the hallway. Or you could be dead._  

With an image of a bald eagle, or something. 

He _was_ going insane. 

“Are you listening to me?” McCoy said abruptly. 

“What? Yeah. Yes. I have. Um, I am.” Sulu guessed he knew what McCoy had been talking about. McCoy had been a trauma surgeon before he joined the force – though why he’d gone from one intensely stressful job to yet another one was beyond Sulu. Perhaps stress was just McCoy’s way of life and reason for living. It was a profound thought, something Sulu would have to consider more later when his head hasn’t filled with what felt like sharp rocks. 

“Have you had your hearing checked lately? Because you tend to get this blank look while I’m talking to you. Here, I’ll tell your doctor to—“ 

McCoy was acting strange. With a fistful of sadly battered flowers and a mysterious waxed paper bag, he fussed at Sulu a bit, stole a look at Sulu’s chart that was in a slot next to the door – much to the consternation of the duty nurse – pronounced Sulu just fine, then abruptly left. Chekov had popped in and out during that little ordeal, winking at Sulu as McCoy had played mother hen. 

After they’d both left, Sulu had opened the wax paper bag to find a donut. 

He stared at it with some surprise. It wasn’t Krispy Kreme, and it was baked and totally unglazed. 

Sulu’s mom came in an hour later with Akiko. Akiko scolded him for not being more careful while their mother cried a little bit at her baby in a hospital bed, which made Sulu crabby and feel like the worst person on the planet. They were kicked out when visiting hours ended, and Sulu heaved a huge sigh of relief. He just wanted rest, and silence, and peace. 

Silence and peace was impossible, of course. He lay awake, listening to the beeps of other patients’ equipment, the sounds of his comatose roommate breathing, and after about two hours of that and nothing else but his thoughts, he was done with silence and peace. 

Where was Kirk? 

He hadn’t seen him all day. And now he was torn between annoyance – would it have killed him to visit? – and irritation at himself for being annoyed. If that made any sense. His own brain didn’t make any sense, even to itself. 

The walls were bare, and even if the tv was on there were no good channels so Sulu stared at Jerry Springer until he dropped off into an uneasy sleep. At some point he imagined – or dreamed – of blue eyes, of a rough hand smoothing back his hair, a gentle touch of lips on his own. 

He woke later to find his Jerry Springer _still_ on – there must be a marathon on – and a giant pink Disney balloon tied to his bed with _Get_ _Well Soon, Princess!_ emblazoned across Aurora in silver and pink letters. It was signed by what looked like the entire precinct who’d also embellished their gift with crude drawings of penises. 

The room wasn’t empty. 

Kirk was sitting next to his bed in the dark. He looked lumpy. 

“Are you staring at me like a creepazoid?” he asked. It came out cracked. Kirk reached over and handed him a cup of water, and Sulu drank it thirstily. 

“You drool when you sleep,” Kirk told him. “It’s kind of cute, in a gross kind of way.” 

“And you snore. And it’s not cute.” Kirk’s lumps moved. 

“Sorry you’re back here,” said Sulu, watching Kirk pull the best imitation of the Terminator as he expressionlessly clamped a hand over one particularly squirming lump. A querulous mewing ensued. “Though I guess it’s better if you’re not the one in the bed—Um. What is that?” 

Kirk jerked and yelled something rather obscene as Spock erupted out from under Kirk’s jacket onto the bed and tried to climb up Sulu’s face. Failing that, he shot into the bathroom to crouch under the sink, hissing at Kirk. 

“There was a cat carrier in the closet next to the front door, you know,” Sulu said flatly, gingerly fingering the scratches on his chest and chin. His thin hospital gown was in tatters. 

“It’s in my car. You tell me how I can sneak a cat into a hospital in a giant cage, and I’ll do it.” Kirk extracted a tin can…of something from his pocket. “Wait here, I’ll get him.” 

“Is that where you’ve been? Playing Cat Whisperer? And most importantly – why is he here _?_ ” 

“We bonded!” Kirk protested. “He needed to be fed and your sister was too busy so she gave me the key to your place.” 

“You—“ Sulu’s mind reeled. “You met my –“ 

“Well, yeah.” He got the can – of tuna, it turned out – open. “I met your mom and Akiko. Your family’s pretty nice. Akiko says you’re a butt, though.” The noise of the lid cracking off had an instant effect: a black nose poked from behind the bathroom door, and Spock gave a curious mew. “And—“ a glance at Sulu, a curiously vulnerable one, “I thought you might want to see him.” 

The slow smile he gave Kirk made that strangely upsetting expression go away. Kirk coughed, seemed to shake himself, and returned to his original task. 

“Here, kitty,” he said in a wheedling tone. “Come to step-daddy, you fucking cranky cat.” 

Kneeling on the floor, he held the can out. Sulu watched as Spock emerged without hesitation and made a beeline for Kirk, who stepped backwards and set the can on Sulu’s bed. “The first step is admitting you have a problem,” he said to Spock as the cat leaped up and began devouring the tuna. 

“You know I don’t feed him human food,” said Sulu, watching the cat. “Too much salt.” 

“I dare you to take it away. Me, I like being on his good side.” Kirk reached out and stroked Spock from head to tail. And miracles of miracles, Spock allowed it. Even arched into it, purring. Another notch on Kirk’s belt, Sulu thought, not nearly as sourly as he would have not six months ago. 

“You are so easily bought,” Sulu told the cat. 

ooo

 

By the next day, Sulu was done. He’d flipped through all ten channels on the staticky hospital television in the corner at least fifty times, he’d read through everything on his rss feeds through his phone until his phone had died. Of the care package his family had brought him, his phone charger had been notably absent, and Kirk had brought nothing but cat and tuna. There were only so many back issues of Cosmopolitan from Akiko that he could page through before wanting to stab himself in the eyes with a spoon to break the boredom. 

Except the hospital-issued spoons were flimsy cheap things, so that would probably end in epic boring fail, as well. 

Then his family visited again, accompanied by Kirana, who’d flown in on the red-eye from New York. He was happy to see her for all of five minutes before he remembered why his sister drove him absolutely fucking _nuts._  

“Why’re you so fucking cranky, Hicky?” Kirana asked with a saccharine smile as their mother bustled about, complaining about the state of Sulu’s kitchen and and his counters, which she’d had the opportunity to survey the night before. 

Sulu somehow couldn’t manage a suitably cutting answer to the nickname he knew _she_ knew he hated – which was why she kept using it – and tried to pretend he was falling asleep. Kirana was the closest in age to him, their being only two years apart with Akiko an unexpected surprise eight years later, and Sulu had to scoff at people who said that single children were lonely. His childhood had certainly not been lonely but in his opinion, the near-constant state of aggravation was hardly an equal trade. 

He tried not to argue with her. A lifetime spent in a family of opinionated siblings had taught him long ago that it was sometimes best to lay low and let the hurricane pass over his head, so to speak. Kirana seemed to sense his disinclination to engage her in argument. Annoyance crossed her face. Sulu was sure she’d come with mom mostly to laugh at him and to maybe get a look at Kirk. 

He wondered where Kirk was. Kirk would cheer him up with his big grin and off-color jokes, but surprisingly, Kirk also knew when to be quiet when a person needed it. 

He wished Kirana were gone. He loved his family, but his shoulder hurt even as he counted down for the next morphone drip, and all he wanted to do at the moment was sleep. 

So when he woke up again, thankfully alone, he resolved to go for The Great Escape. 

Kirk arrived just as Sulu was about to enter the elevator. They stopped short, Kirk poised to step off while Sulu was poised to step on. Sulu had found his old pants, but his shirt had been cut off him in the ambulance so he still wore his hospital gown. He knew he looked downright strange, his hair puffed up in all directions after several days in bed and his torso wrapped in bandages like a horror flick mummy, but this was it. He was getting the fuck out of here. 

From behind Sulu came the loud beeping of monitoring equipment whose patient was coding, or had mysteriously slipped the traces and escaped the ward. 

Sulu pushed Kirk aside. “Go, go, go!” he snapped, slapping at the button for the first floor until the doors slid closed. 

Kirk gaped at him so comically that Sulu gasped in laughter, even though it hurt. 

“Just to clarify,” Kirk said after a moment, during which the elevator slipped from 10 to 9 to 8, “You’re escaping, right?” 

 “I swear I’ll go insane if I spend one more day in that bed.” He could also totally live without his sisters. The line had been drawn. He was a convalescent. He deserved peace and quiet, and he wasn’t going to stand for them being…them. 

“At the risk of being accused of hypocrisy, did you happen to forget that you got stabbed? And lost a lot of blood?” Kirk was seeing the humor in the situation, Sulu could tell, but genuine concern tempered the amusement. Thankfully, he didn’t comment on the paleness of Sulu’s skin as Sulu wheezed through the return of the pain, hunched over against the wall. “Why. Why are you doing this to yourself, Hikaru? Look at you, you can’t even stand!” 

“I hate hospital food,” Sulu said, and laughed rustily at the look on Kirk’s face. “It’s all nutritionally balanced and healthy for you and it’s fucking gross. I have the hugest craving for something salty and greasy and really really bad for you, and _you can take that look off your face, asshole._ ” 

“I just.” Kirk shook his head. “Come here.” Sulu found himself there before he could stop himself, and the realization of how much he’d missed the idiot coming over him in a warm wash as he leaned into Kirk, kept him from pulling away. He was tired, so unbelievably tired. That fifty feet from room to elevator had been like fifty miles, and taken what felt like hours as he’d inched along like a geriatric on the lam. Kirk smelled good, like citrus. His sweater was covered in black cat hair. 

“Well,” Kirk said against his hair, “I’d be a terrible boyfriend if I didn’t give you what you want.” 

Sulu heard the word, processed it, kept processing it all the way out to the parking lot past the seriously shoddy security, all the way to Kirk’s car, and through the KFC drive-thru instead of eating in because they’d agreed that even with substituting the hospital gown for a dubiously clean t-shirt Kirk had dug out from under soda cans and cds from the 1990s in the back seat, Sulu still looked exactly what he was: a patient escaped from the hospital. Maybe rehab, what with the dark circles under his eyes and scratches all over his face and arms, but a hospital all the same. 

Processed it, computed the answer, then he put down his spicy chicken sandwich. He’d requested extra lettuce in a ham-fisted, contrite attempt to have his illicit lunch have at least somenutritional merit, and it slid out in a mayonnaise-y glob as he grabbed Kirk’s ears like door handles and kissed him. 

Kirk had a smile on his face when he pulled away, a soft, secret one, and miracles of miracles, Kirk was blushing. Blushing a brick red that swept all the way from his neck to his forehead, his eyes bright. He was beautiful, sitting there with grease on his ears and brimming with mischevious triumph. Sulu knew then that this was what it was, and he was along for the ride. 

Maybe, one day, he’d let Kirk drive the car. 

Maybe.


	8. Epilogue

There was something to be said about karma. For all that Kirk lived on pizza pockets and high fructose corn syrup and was really disgustingly healthy anyway (Sulu was jealous), and he thought he was awesome and generally most people agreed with him (Sulu didn’t let on that he did too; he thought Kirk’s head sufficiently swollen for _that)_ , and he seemed to like Sulu for some inexplicable reason despite Sulu being balky and easily irritated and trying to convert Kirk to the wonders of organic food, there was some balance in the world. 

Namely, Kirk looked ridiculous in a swimsuit. 

Not that there was anything wrong with his body. 

More like, he burned faster than bacon on a hot engine, to quote McCoy. Now he was hunched under the relative shade of the Sulu family beach canopy, belatedly slathering sunscreen and aloe vera on the vulnerable parts of himself, and twisting himself around like a yogi doing an imitation of a pretzel. Sulu wasn’t enjoying Kirk's pain so much as he was enjoying the blistering McCoy was giving him with the rough side of his tongue. 

“—You wanna die young of melanoma? You know what that stuff does to you? Huh? Dammit, are you listening to me? No, don’t stop, put more on! You frackin’ idiot, you look like a goddamn lobster that’s been boiled too long.” 

Kirk gave Sulu a pathetic look that said, _Rescue me._ Sulu dug his toes into the sand and said lazily, “Man oh man, you’re gonna freckle so bad.” 

A sunscreen bottle hit him square in the temple and knocked his sunglasses off. “You.” McCoy pointed a threatening finger at him. “You stop cackling and help me. Put some of that on his back. And while you’re at it, put more on yourself.” 

“I have enough,” Sulu protested. “You’re not my mom.” 

“Hikaru, do as Leonard says,” his mom said, not looking up from her paperback, which was rather horrifyingly titled _Silk is for Seduction_. It was hard to believe the woman had a doctorate in Japanese literature. 

“But I just –“ 

She did look up then. “Why don’t you go rub some lotion on Jim, then?” Her eyes twinkled, and Sulu mentally made a list of things that he would gladly give up to not have his mom look like that ever again. Like, air. Or his PS3. Or Chekov, who was totally ignoring the point of being at the beach and was lounging around in a beach chair, beer in one hand, and texting madly with the other. Kirana sat next to him in a bikini Sulu thoroughly disapproved of, and was doing the same. 

“I want to go swimming,” he said loudly. “Someone come with me.” 

The general response was an apathetic mumble. It was two in the afternoon, on a cloudless, windless July 4th. They’d arrived by 8am to this secluded beach in Santa Cruz to find parking, because Sulu’s dad hated jockeying for parking. And he also hated traffic. So, as it usually happened on the Sulu family July 4th beach parties, everyone had gorged on burned meat and store-bought salads and chips, and were ready for naps by three. 

So he set off alone, to look for Akiko. He found her where she had been building a sand-sculpture in the shape of a foot. Now she wasn’t alone; a muscly young man in a UC Santa Cruz cap and no shirt leaned over her. She was smiling, he was smiling. Sulu was not. He skidded up to them and planted himself firmly next to Akiko, and fixed the dude with his best _I will fuck your shit up_ cop glare. 

It worked, helped along by the long, jagged scar that his mom (argh) and Kirk assured him was very sexy in a rakish, dangerous way. He thought it was unsightly, along with his shoulder hurting when it was rainy and his arm stiff from severed tendons but slowly limbering up with physical therapy, but all in all, he knew how fortunate he was. 

The guy mumbled something and fled for less hazardous grounds. Akiko glared at Sulu. “You are such a butt,” she announced, and slung sand at him. 

“God, you liked that gorilla? He looks like that guy from Jersey Shore. Please tell me you have better taste than that.” 

“I hate you.” 

“You and your future children who won’t look like gorillas will thank me.” 

She brushed sand off her legs. “He gave me his number,” she said smugly. “You wanna go boogey-boarding? The waves are coming in again.” 

The beach filled up by late afternoon. By the time the sun set, everyone had woken up from their somnolent naps, considerably sandy and sticky with sweat and dried salt. It had grown chill, and Sulu went back to the car for extra blankets. His mom and dad left on a solitary walk down the beach, leaving the younger people to sit around the bonfire with marshmallows, waiting for the fireworks to begin. 

“Dinshaw made a plea bargain,” Chekov said abruptly, looking up and waving his phone. “Just got the email from the DA.” 

“That asshole, he couldn’t have waited until Monday?” McCoy’s marshmallow was on fire. He shook it to put it out, then swore as it blazed up into an even bigger fireball before contracting into a cinder. “What’d he cop to?” 

“Involuntary manslaughter, first-degree assault, and assault on a police officer. Ten years.” 

Kirk swore under his breath. Sulu nudged him and handed him a marshmallow. Dinshaw was getting off light. He’d never confessed to killing Tamura, though forensics had linked him inarguably to the scene. The final theory had been that he’d liked her for years, fixated on her, had taken the same classes as she did. But then he’d found out about the curator, and he’d…snapped. God knew what would have happened if he’d been a little more lucky that day, if he’d been able to dump the body. Maybe they wouldn’t have ever found her. 

“It’s okay,” Sulu told Kirk, nudging him again with his knee, making it more a question than a statement. 

Kirk raked a hand through his hair and let out his breath. He looked over at Sulu and shrugged. "Yeah. It'll have to be." 

“Here.” Akiko stuck a mug in front of Sulu's face, blocking his view of the fire. 

“Is this…Sanka?” he asked, making a face. 

“Yes. It’s coffee and it’s all we have. You’re lucky I even made you any. Quit bitching, Roo.” 

“Hicky,” Kirk grinned, and pushed his foot up onto Sulu’s lap. Sulu choked, sputtered. “Hicky Roo Roo.” 

“Oh god, you made me snort coffee!” 

Akiko laughed. “Make him do that again, it’s hilarious when he gets pissed off.” 

Kirana added, “Call him Kangaroo.” 

“Pikachu?” Chekov grinned. “This is a fun game.” 

“Oh my god, you guys are all jerks. I’m disowning you. I’m going to get my ipod out of the car. You guys stay here and be jerks.” 

As he left, he heard Kirana say distinctly to Chekov, “Oh look, he’s flouncing, isn’t that cute?” 

As he padded through the sand that was rapidly cooling as the sun set, he listened for the sounds of Kirk following, and wasn’t disappointed. “Come on, I was kidding,” Kirk panted as he caught up. “Your nicknames are adorable.” 

“Adorable isn’t something I aspire to,” Sulu growled at him as he wrenched open his parents’ minivan door and rooted through the lifetime supply of napkins and straws in the glove compartment that his parents always filched from fast food restaurants. “Did Ako steal my ipod again?” 

“I said I was sorry,” Kirk said from behind, and then suddenly hands were on his ass and pulling down his swim trunks and he yelped, accompanied with an undignified jerk that Kirk used to shove him further into the van. The van rocked as Kirk climbed in after him, the automatic door sliding shut with a click. 

“What are you _do-_ this is my parents’ car! Stop, get your hands out of—“ Kirk was a warm weight on him, pinning him down. He forgot to struggle or protest as Kirk kissed him then, tasting of sea water and a hint of toasted sweetness, his lips marshmallow-sticky. Then cool hands skimming down his torso, Kirk’s sunburned forehead following, a feverishly warm counterpoint, then a warm, wet tongue dipping into his belly-button. 

“Don’t, I’m all sandy,” he protested, but weakly. 

“Don’t worry,” Kirk said, in between tracing wet patterns across Sulu’s belly that made him laugh, high and breathless. “I’m well roasted. You’re well seasoned. It all works out.” 

“That doesn’t even make any sense.” 

“You think too much,” Kirk told him and slid back up. They kissed in the last fading light of the day, slow at first, then with increasing urgency, and oh god it was weird doing this in the backseat of his parents’ car _,_ but the only semi-coherent thought he could muster about it as he wrapped his hand around Kirk’s cock and Kirk made that soft, almost hurt sound that Sulu loved, was a vague gratitude that at least it was a mini-van, and thereby much more comfortable – and sanitary – than the backseat of a precinct car. 

Because he had priorities. 

“Come on, hurry up,” he said, jacking Kirk faster. “People might see.” Kirk dug his too-warm forehead into the crook of Sulu’s shoulder and just worried at the skin there with his teeth. They writhed together, all sunscreen-sticky skin, gritty sand, Kirk pulling back and looking down at him with that vulnerable look on his face. Their rhythm shattered apart as Kirk reached down and pulled him out just enough to reciprocate, and Sulu surged up with a gasp to pull him in. 

They shuddered against each other, breathing hard, Kirk still giving him those mindless, open-mouthed wet kisses. 

Those napkins were good for something, after all. 

He never did find his ipod. 

Karma, he thought. It usually worked itself out. In the distance, shouts and laughter arose as McCoy swore, his marshmallow again engulfed in flames. This wasn’t anywhere near what he’d projected for himself as a seven-year-old, but then his seven-year-old self had been an idiot. He smiled at that, watching the bright dot of fire waving wildly before being snuffed. 

 As they walked back down the stairs to the beach, Sulu took Kirk's hand as if it were the most natural thing to do. Later, as the fireworks lit up the sky over the ocean in multi-colored sparks and Akiko was bickering with Kirana and Chekov was taking pictures with his phone and McCoy set fire to more marshmallows, Kirk looked over and gave him that secret smile once again.

**Author's Note:**

> DETAILED WARNINGS:  
> 1\. Graphic descriptions of crime scenes, though probably not more graphic than you'd see in procedural tv shows like Law and Order, Bones, or CSI, which are generally rated PG-13 (I believe). However, if that is really not your cup of tea, there are only one particularly graphic description in the first chapter, and another in the beginning of the second, which you may be able to skip.
> 
> 2\. Graphic descriptions of violence. Kirk goes to a dark place and he starts skirting the edges of losing control, though I don't think it's TOO bad. I hope you can stay with me on this one; this isn't Kirk's usual behavior, and things do get better.


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